Inside al-Qaeda's Georgia Refuge

Som

etime 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.

Earlier this year, the Pankisi Arabs tried to buy a large amount of explosive for what Georgian security officials believe was to have been a major bomb attack on U.S. or other Western installations in Russia. And a six-man team of chemists had also worked on poisons to be used against individuals or groups of Westerners in Central Asia. Both plans were disrupted by Georgian officials working with their U.S. counterparts. But the crackdown on al-Qaeda became possible only after sweeping changes in the Georgian security structures. Until the end of last year, top Georgian sources say, the Arabs were so well protected by high-ranking and very corrupt officials that they could move around with impunity. In late 2001, however, the controversial ministers of State Security and Interior were dismissed, and in early 2002 Georgia?s longtime ambassador to Washington, Tedo Jafaridze, was appointed national security adviser. When the new leadership of the State Security and related ministries took over, very senior officials told TIME, they found that all files on the Pankisi and terrorism had disappeared.

The Pankisi al-Qaeda suspects were mostly in their late twenties and mid thirties, from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt. Some, like Abu Yasim, looked nothing like warriors. Others, such as the one-legged man known as Abu-Iyad, were combat veterans. They had begun arriving in the Gorge, some three hours? drive north of the capital Tbilisi — and about 40 miles south of Chechnya — after the Russians invaded Chechnya for the second time in late 1999. At the time, local power was divided uneasily among drug dealers, kidnappers and about 450 Chechen guerrillas under the command of Ruslan Gelayev. The Arabs kept to themselves, living in the village of Omalo, where they established their communications center, and two other villages closer to the central settlement of Duisi. From Omalo they kept in touch with Chechnya, Azerbaijan and Turkey, Britain and Germany. And they brought in many hundreds of thousands of dollars for their operations, using couriers who arrived every other months or by wire transfers to front companies in Tbilisi. Using the Internet to recruit volunteers to fight in Chechnya, they helped them travel covertly to the area, trained them and sent them on to join Khattab?s "Islamic International Brigade." (Khattab, admired by other guerrillas for his prowess but often disliked for his religious fundamentalism, was killed by Russian forces last March.)

Chechen guerrillas who were not affiliated with Khattab appear to have had some reservations about al-Qaeda. "The Arabs were always a little different," said a Chechen close to Ruslan Gelayev, referring obliquely to the Arabs? fundamentalist Islam. "And we are fighting for survival, while they are waging their jihad." Some Chechen commanders were reportedly unwilling to become involved in the al-Qaeda plans to strike Western targets in Russia, arguing that this was not their war. But there was never an open rift: they received money and other help from the Arabs as well.

Georgia?s crackdown on the Pankisi Arabs began in May, led by Irakli Alasania, the 28 year-old, U.S.-Ranger trained deputy minister of State Security. Supported by what a senior official calls "real time intelligence" from the U.S., security operatives ambushed a car not far from Duisi, the main village in Pankisi. They shot the driver and grabbed three Arabs, one of whom, security sources say, was a "poisoner." Chechen guerrillas recall that the ambush sent ripples of fear through the valley: They were told not to leave their billets unless absolutely necessary, and be circumspect even in their contacts with local people. Later raids netted among others Abu Yasim and, Georgian officials say, Saif al-Islam el Masry, a member of the Al Qaeda consultative council or shura. In late August, the Arabs received orders from inside Chechnya: pull out. The top al-Qaeda man, a Jordanian known as Abu Hafs, slipped into Chechnya. Twelve others, allegedly more junior people in search of martyrdom, joined Chechen fighters under Gelayev when he crossed into Russia last month. Georgian security forces are still tracking a small group of others, including one poisoner and Abu Iyad, now the most senior operative for Georgia and its neighbors. The Georgians? biggest prize, Iyad, has proven particularly elusive. "He?s very cunning," said a senior Border Troops officer. "He?s a pain in the ass," said an even higher-ranking security officer. The stragglers have scatted, officials say, and are lying low, waiting for "new papers and a safe route out." And a new stage in the struggle.