The West

Georgia

McCain's Speech on the Russian Invasion of Georgia:

2002

ON PATROL: Georgian soldiers search the Pankisi Gorge region for Arab militants

SHAKH AIVAZOV/AP


Some history of events in the region with thanks to J Tex.

Dated May 20 2004
Ansar al-Islam and the Pankisi Gorge

That Ansar al-Islam was working on cyanide gas, arsine, phosgene, attempts produce mustard gas and VX, botulinum and alfatoxin is, generally speaking, old news. What is unfortunate, however, is that the role of the Pankisi Gorge in serving as an incubator for this type of al-Qaeda activity is not receiving more press coverage, though I will give former French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy a great deal of credit for mentioning the threat posed by the continued existence of al-Qaeda bases in the Russian republic of Chechnya as well as neighboring Georgia.

Link

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/004977.php

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Dated 2002

Inside al-Qaeda's Georgia Refuge

By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE/DUISI, PANKISI GORGE, GEORGIA

Sometime last spring Kemal, a university student from Istanbul who had volunteered to fight for the Chechen cause, was approached in the market of this remote but prosperous village by an Arab man in his late twenties. Kemal, who knew little Russian or Chechen, was pleased to find the man spoke fluent English. "He must have come from the UK or the U.S.," he recalled. The Arab, known in the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia as Abu Yasim, peppered Kemal with questions about his affiliations in Turkey and his guerrilla unit here. But when Kemal asked him an innocuous question in turn, the man fell silent. "I got the message," Kemal said. The Arabs ask questions, not the other way around.

Abu Yasim had, in fact, studied in the Britain, and was, security officials of this NATO-friendly former Soviet republic say, "pretty good with computers." Yasim, along with some 14 others, is now in U.S. custody, almost certainly at Guantanamo. He had been a middle-ranking member in a team of about 60 Arabs hiding out in the Pankisi — computer, communications and financial specialists, military trainers, chemists and bombers. The Georgian security officials who have been rolling them up over the past four months call them "Arabs with links to terrorist groups." The U.S. simply calls them al-Qaeda.

Interviews with top advisers to Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, senior Georgian security officials and fugitive Chechen fighters depict the al-Qaeda operation in Pankisi as part of a multi-layered, interlocking, region-wide organizational structure, with decentralized planning and procurement systems. The Pankisi groups, using sophisticated satellite-based and encrypted communications, sometimes concentrated on their own operations — including refugee work and recruiting for Khattab, the Saudi-born guerrilla commander in Chechnya believed to have been close to Osama bin Laden. At other times they lent a hand to the broader 'jihad' against the U.S. and its allies. For the Pankisi operatives, this meant trying to target U.S. and western interests in Russia and Central Asia using poison and bombs.

Link

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,366217,00.html

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Arab Militants Caught in Georgian Gorge

By Peter Baker

Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 22, 2002

MOSCOW, Oct. 21 -- Special forces in Georgia have captured 15 Arab militants linked to al Qaeda in recent weeks and turned them over to the United States, Georgian officials said today.
Authorities in the former Soviet republic seized the men during a series of raids in the lawless Pankisi Gorge, where U.S. intelligence agencies have said a small al Qaeda cell operated in recent years alongside hundreds of Chechen separatists waging war against Russian forces across the border to the north.

"There were several Arabs who were detained and extradited to the United States and the investigation continued in the United States," Kakha Imnadze, press secretary for President Eduard Shevardnadze, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tbilisi, today. "It turned out some of them had connections [to al Qaeda], or probably all of them. Pankisi is not a tourist attraction."

Read the rest

Staff writer Dana Priest in Washington contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61632-2002Oct21?language=printer

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