#3 - JRL 7223
New York Times
June 15, 2003
U.S. Entangled in Mystery of Georgia's Islamic Fighters
By DEXTER FILKINS

PANKISI GORGE, Georgia, June 11 — For months, local residents say, the group of 15 Arab and Central Asian fighters lived quietly in a two-story house here, among the hundreds of guerrillas who had turned this wooded vale near the Russian border into a burgeoning center of Islamic militancy.

Like many of those who gathered here, the fighters had come over the snowy passes from Chechnya, where they had been helping their fellow Muslims in their struggle to break with the Russian republic. They exercised to stay in shape and went into the woods to practice shooting. Some of the militants departed, presumably for Russia, while new ones came to prepare for the fight.

Then, one night last fall, according to local residents, the group of Arabs and Central Asians packed up and left. Over the next several months, villagers and Georgian officials said, hundreds of other fighters followed, never to return.

"One morning, I got up, and they were gone," said Valodya Tskhovrebov, a farmer who lived near the Arab fighters. "They were nice guys. They didn't drink or smoke."

The departure of the Islamic fighters from this gorge in the Caucasus Mountains appears to represent an uncertain victory for the Bush administration, which last year asserted that the area had become a center of activity by Al Qaeda. To help Georgia confront the threat, the administration dispatched a team of Green Berets last year to provide military training to the country's troops.

Since last August, when Georgian forces began an operation to clear the gorge, senior Georgian leaders and Western diplomats here say the number of guerrillas in the gorge has dropped to fewer than 50 from about 700. The passage of militants across the mountains into Chechnya has largely ceased for the moment, according to Western diplomats and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has dispatched observers to watch the border.

Georgian officials say they detained more than 30 militants from the gorge, most of them Arabs or Chechens. They were deported, the officials said, to countries ranging from Russia to France and Japan, where officials say they detained a Japanese citizen helping the guerrillas.

A senior Georgian official said his government had also turned over 13 Arab fighters to the United States government last fall. The Arabs had been found in the gorge and were suspected of being involved in the Chechen campaign. It is unclear what the Americans did with them.

"We just handed them over," the Georgian official said.

Officials at the American Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, declined to comment on the reported deportations. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration has taken into custody hundreds of foreign citizens suspected of terrorism and held them without charges or access to legal representation. The administration has refused to release the names of those arrested, considering them enemy combatants.

What happened to the hundreds of other fighters who left the Pankisi Gorge remains a mystery that casts doubt on the ultimate success of the operation to sweep the area of Islamic militants. Villagers said that most of the fighters were Chechen, and that once it became clear they were no longer welcome in Georgia, they headed back toward Russia. Some of the fighters, they said, were killed by Russian soldiers as they crossed the mountains.

Indeed, the American-backed effort to clear the gorge of terrorists appears to have become a de facto campaign against the Chechen nationalist movement as well, thereby entangling the United States in the region's politics to a greater extent than before. By most accounts here, the overwhelming majority of the fighters in the gorge were Chechens, and while they were intensely religious, they were dedicated to striking at Russian, not Western, targets.

For months, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had threatened to send his country's forces into Georgia against the Chechen rebels he said were taking shelter in the Pankisi Gorge. Georgian officials, fearing a Russian attack, turned to the United States for help last year.

Georgian officials say Mr. Putin was furious over their decision to invite American military trainers into a country that he regards as falling within Russia's sphere of influence. But for now, the threat of invasion seems to have ebbed.

Yet while the operation appears to have succeeded in apprehending several individuals with possible links to Al Qaeda, it also appears to have killed many Chechen guerrillas, and thereby to have embittered Chechens who looked to the United States for sympathy in what they considered a legitimate revolt against a repressive government.

One Chechen refugee, Acima Imadiova, who lives in a dilapidated community center in the gorge, approached an American visitor, wearing a bitter smile. "Tell Mr. Bush to stop the war in Chechnya," she said. "Ask him why he is paddling in the same boat with Putin."

The first Chechen guerrillas began arriving here in 1999, as the second Chechen war got under way. The gorge, a lush river valley about 25 miles from the Russian border, was already home to several thousand ethnic Chechens known as the Kist, whose ancestors had migrated to predominantly Christian Georgia a century ago.

By all appearances, the gorge was a perfect sanctuary for the fighters to rest and regroup. Grozny was but two days away by foot, through one of the innumerable passes that lead to Russia. Before long, as many as 6,000 Chechen refugees had arrived, along with as many as 1,500 fighters.

Georgian officials say that by late last summer, the Pankisi Gorge was, in effect, Chechen territory, a place where Georgian forces ventured at their peril.

"We didn't dare come into the gorge," said Nika Laliashvili, a senior official with Georgia's Ministry for State Security. "The Chechens controlled it."

In August, under pressure from both the Americans and the Russians, Georgian officials decided to sweep the gorge of the militants. But instead of mounting a large-scale invasion, the Georgians took a more subtle approach. Officials met with village elders and told them the militants could no longer stay.

"We did not want to have a confrontation," said David Bakradze of Georgia's National Security Council. "We said, `If you won't go, then we'll kick you out.' "

The Georgians say they did not use the battalions trained by the Green Berets, but those units did stage a military exercise outside the gorge shortly before the operation began.

Georgian officials declined to speak in detail about the level of resistance they encountered when they entered the gorge. But they offered one example of where, they said, Georgian forces had proved effective. Last fall, they said, they forced a group of about 30 mostly Chechen fighters back across the border. The group, they said, walked right into a force of Russian soldiers, who killed many of them.

At the same time, Georgian officials described an incident in which an Arab fighter with apparent links to Al Qaeda might have been allowed to get away. Georgian officials said they believed that the man, Abu Hafsi, had been running financial operations in the gorge and had supervised the building of a military hospital there. He slipped away, presumably to Chechnya, officials said.

In the Pankisi Gorge, local residents largely confirmed the government's account. Zhora Shavlokhov, headmaster of the Dumasturi Elementary School, said the 30 fighters arrived about 18 months ago and occupied the school. Mr. Shavlokhov said he did not much like the men, but they carried guns and brooked no arguments.

Mr. Shavlokhov said the fighters were an odd mix: doctors, lawyers, criminals and drug addicts. Indeed, the detritus left behind filled out the details of the headmaster's story: a makeshift exercise bar was still suspended between two trees, and used hypodermic needles and empty vials lay scattered about the yard.

"The Russians killed them at the border," he said.

A Western diplomat in Tbilisi said his government was not upset with the way the Georgians chose to move most of the militants out of the gorge. As long as the militants left the gorge — the only inhabitable area along the Russian border — then his government was satisfied, he said.

The diplomat expressed frustration, however, that Georgian leaders were not more aggressive with the 50-odd militants still in the gorge.

Chechen refugees here express a different kind of frustration. Their camps are full of families who braved snowy mountains and Russian guns in their flight from their homes, and they ask why the outside world, and particularly the American government, seems more concerned with Al Qaeda than with aggrieved civilians.

"Bush would do anything to have Russia in his coalition," said Baslan Gidiev, who walked across the mountains three years ago.

Even so, they say they, too, are happy that the militants of the Pankisi Gorge have left.

"We admire them, and we think they are brave," said Ruslan Nalayev, who also left Chechnya three years ago. "But when they are here, they bring great danger. We're glad they are gone."