Nature of Threat in Georgia Gorge a Matter of Dispute

A band of Arab fighters in the mountains near this country’s Pankisi Gorge have caused sufficient alarm that the United States is preparing to spend $64 million in part to help the Georgian military get rid of them.

Philip Remler, a senior U.S. diplomat in Georgia, said in February that dozens of fighters from Afghanistan, including Al Qaeda members, had fled to the Caucasus in recent months.

But authorities in this former Soviet republic, both local and national, dispute that contention. They say that although the Pankisi region has more than its share of criminal activity, there are probably only a dozen or so renegade Arabs here.

A handful of American military advisors are already in Georgia in advance of the U.S. program, which will train and equip four anti-terrorist battalions with 300 to 400 men each to bring the Pankisi Gorge under control. About 200 Americans will be involved, with a new contingent arriving this week. Exercises in the six-month training program are planned for summer.

According to Georgian security officials, however, the immediate threat the young men in the mountains pose is not to the U.S. or Georgia, but to Russia. They say the Arabs are waiting for the snow to melt so they can cross the Caucasus Mountains to the north and join separatists in the Russian republic of Chechnya in their fight against Kremlin control.

The Georgian security officials, upon whom the U.S. relies for most of its intelligence about the gorge, do not know the men’s nationalities, what route they took to get to Georgia, whether they ever fought in Afghanistan or whether they have ties to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.

Analysts in Georgia play down any serious or immediate terrorist threat emanating from the Pankisi Gorge. They see the U.S. program as designed to avert possible future threats, to prop up the weak and corrupt Georgian state in a region of U.S. oil interests and to strengthen America’s foothold in the Caucasus.

On Monday, U.S. officials in Washington acknowledged that while they are concerned about the presence of anti-American Islamic fighters in Georgia, the principal goal of the new aid program is to stabilize the region by helping Georgia exert more control over its territory.

They said the Georgian government has been unable to properly police its borders, and argued that regional stability is threatened if the Russian government needs to chase terrorists into Georgia.

One State Department official said that the number of Arab fighters in Georgia was unclear and that estimates ranged from a dozen to as many as 200.

To local security officials such as Imzar Machalikashvili, 27, of this village in the Pankisi Gorge, reports of Al Qaeda terrorists hiding out in the area always seemed inflated.

“There’s no evidence that there are dozens of Al Qaeda fighters here. At most, there are 10 to 15 Arabs, and there’s no information that they are connected with Al Qaeda,” Machalikashvili said.

“We don’t know whose interests are being served, but the threat has clearly been exaggerated, and the entire situation has been blown out of all proportion,” he added.

Machalikashvili’s estimate of the number of fighters was echoed this month by the minister of state security, the defense minister, the interior minister and a security officer with the Chechen separatists who is familiar with the Pankisi Gorge.

Struggling to Be Rid of Russian Interference

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Georgia, a frail former Soviet republic, has struggled to get out from under often belligerent Russian interference. But despite close U.S. links and about $900 million in American aid over the last five years, the country has stumbled because of colossal bribe taking and other malfeasance in the government, the police and the military.

Analysts and Western advisors now suspect that most of the aid was stolen, and some critics even suggest that, if not for the U.S. anti-terror campaign, the West might have given up on Georgia in disgust.

But Georgia’s strategic position in the Transcaucasus--the transit corridor the United States would like to use to ship oil from the Caspian Sea--means that was never very likely.

The Pankisi Gorge, a tiny shard of territory in northeastern Georgia, about 8 miles long and 4 miles wide, has been associated with crime and smuggling for centuries. But after the Soviet collapse and a subsequent decline in the power of regional authorities, the situation--involving mainly locals in the business of kidnapping, drug running and arms smuggling--worsened.

There are more than 100 local criminals hiding in the gorge, according to security officials, who say there are also several hundred separatist fighters or former fighters who crossed the rugged mountains from Chechnya to escape Russia’s brutal military campaign there.

Recently, Georgia’s crime-fighting and security agencies stationed five Interior Ministry checkpoints in the gorge and arrested some local crime figures in a bid to reassert their authority. But it still takes only a $100 bribe to pass through any of the checkpoints, according to Georgian journalists who have done so.

The Georgian explanation of the Pankisi problem is a quaint one, based on an ancient Caucasus tradition of extravagant and selfless hospitality. A looming statue above the capital, Tbilisi, embodies the same idea: that it is your duty to play host to and defend even an enemy who seeks shelter in your home.

When thousands of refugees poured into Georgia from Chechnya in 1999, fighters came with them, some fed up with the conflict, others seeking a respite. Meanwhile, Arabs and other combatants who wanted to join the Chechen separatists traveled through Georgia, while others supplied weapons to the Chechens via the gorge. The local villagers, mainly Kists--ethnic Chechens in Georgia with close ties to Chechnya--asked no questions.

“They [the Chechens] came here and lead proper lives. No one asks if they fight or not,” said Akhmed Margoshvili, 65, of Duisi. He had seen a few Arabs in the village a week earlier, he said.

“There are very few of them. I just saw the faces of a very few. I don’t know where they came from or why. You don’t see them often,” he said. “The Arabs don’t violate anything. If they have problems with somebody else, it’s not our business. We don’t want to know about it.”

David Lordkipanidze, head of the Akhmeta regional security service, which covers the gorge, said his men have been in contact with Chechen fighters who supported the Arabs, bringing them food.

He said that the Arabs arrived in September, before any U.S. military action against Afghanistan, and that there is no evidence the men had been fighting there.

Occasionally, some of the Arabs come into Duisi, he said, but they don’t communicate much with the local people.

“Our sources tell us what they are planning and what they’re going to do next. They want to get out of here as soon as the pass [through the mountains into Chechnya] opens,” Lordkipanidze said.

“They’re afraid because they hear all these reports about Georgia and America launching an anti-terrorist operation.”

The atmosphere in the gorge is quiet but tense. Young men wearing camouflage clothing and military caps lounge around a recently built mosque. Others in military camouflage cruise by in cars. But try to approach any of these men on foot and they dart down side alleys, turn and walk briskly away, disappear into buildings or halt their cars a distance away.

Lordkipanidze claims that the Duisi mosque was funded by Saudi Arabian money and that the men near the mosque are Chechen Wahhabis--members of a fundamentalist Islamic movement brought here from Chechnya. Traditionally, people in Chechnya and the Pankisi Gorge have adhered to the softer Sufi tradition of Islam.

Lordkipanidze, who lives in Duisi, estimates that 80% of the Wahhabis in the region are involved in crime.

But the terms under which a foreign journalist could visit the gorge this month included traveling with Lordkipanidze’s subordinate, Machalikashvili, who prevented any movement toward the mosque or the young men near it, claiming that here Christians cannot walk by or approach a mosque. That assertion was contradicted by other locals.

Malika Sadykova, 50, a refugee in Duisi from the Chechen capital, Grozny, said the Wahhabis have tried to lure young men to fight a holy war.

“I believe they’re trying to use the word ‘Wahhabism’ as a smoke screen for criminal activity. The Wahhabis distort Islam. They carry around videotapes that they use to spread the word [of Wahhabism] among the local population,” she said. “They’re teaching our young boys that they should die in this holy war. Wahhabism just destroys our youth.”

Concern About Group’s Emergence

While officials downplay any terrorist threat, Irakly Alasania, first deputy minister of state security in Georgia, said Georgian authorities have been deeply concerned about the emergence of the Wahhabi movement in the gorge.

He said there has been no evidence that the Arabs in the gorge, whose number he put at “no more than a dozen,” have Al Qaeda links. But he said it is possible that some have connections with a separatist commander in Chechnya named Khattab, a Wahhabi who might have Al Qaeda ties. It is known that Khattab sent some fighters to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban.

Alasania said Georgian officials prevented a Jordanian and a Saudi from entering the country early last year after receiving information that the two men were planning terrorist acts against Russia. Officials also detained five Afghans several weeks ago, though those men insisted that they were simple refugees, not moujahedeen. The men, who carried no identification, were sent to neighboring Azerbaijan, from which they had entered Georgia. There have been no other such cases, Alasania said.

A Chechen security official in Tbilisi representing the separatist Chechen leader, Aslan Maskhadov, said he had met two Arab fighters, aged 22 and 23, in the city two weeks earlier. They had intended to go to Chechnya to fight but were afraid because of reports that the U.S. was planning to assist Georgia in clearing the Pankisi Gorge.

“They had visas. Later, they went back to the United Arab Emirates. They said, ‘We are not terrorists, and all this pressure has just taken away our will to fight,’ ” said the official, who did not wish to be identified.

“They’re just young guys. The people who are helping us have no links to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda,” he insisted.

He said that several years ago, there were about 250 Arab fighters in Chechnya but that most were killed in the war there.

Tbilisi-based military analyst Kakha Katsitadze said there is neither a major terrorist threat nor a significant Islamic fundamentalist presence in the gorge. But if no action is taken to control the area, he said, threats could emerge in the future.

“The problem is not that there are some fighters sitting in the Pankisi Gorge,” he said. “The problem is that there are not effective state structures to deal with these problems.”

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Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.