U.S. anti-terror campaign arrives in Georgia

Reuters
April 30, 2002

TBILISI, Georgia (Reuters) - American military experts have started arriving in Georgia to help the impoverished former Soviet state's rag-tag army fight Islamic extremists as part of the U.S.-led campaign against terror.

They add to the growing U.S. military presence in parts of the old Soviet Union, notably Central Asia, since the September 11 terror attacks in the United States.

Thousands of U.S. troops and advisers are also involved in the Philippines and Yemen, training local soldiers to counter Muslim rebels linked to the al Qaeda network.

The U.S. experts, who arrived in the run-down Georgian capital Monday night, are preparing the ground for some 200 military instructors Washington promised to send to the country, riven by separatism since independence in 1991.

Television showed a group of Americans in civilian clothes arriving on a flight from London. None of them commented before they left the airport for a Tbilisi hotel.

The 20-strong advance party includes logistics and communication experts who will prepare the groundwork for the arrival of the full training force, the U.S. embassy said.

"It is a first, logistic group which will prepare the infrastructure to allow training to begin," Deputy Defense Minister Gela Bezhuashvili said Tuesday.

The U.S. embassy said the "train and equip" program aimed at helping Georgia flush out Islamic militants widely believed to have bases its lawless Pankisi Gorge.

Russia says the gorge is also home to fighters from rebel Chechnya, just to the north, and initially bristled at the prospect of yet more U.S. troops in its traditional zone of influence.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin later said the move was "no tragedy" for Russian interests. The arrival of the U.S. troops comes just weeks before he hosts a summit with President Bush with whom relations have turned increasingly warm since the September attacks.

POOR TROOPS

Georgia's armed forces are in a poor state, badly-trained and sometimes mutinous, and have been defeated in two separatist wars since independence.

The country spends just $17 million a year on defense, a fraction of the $64 million the Pentagon says it is to spend on what it sees as a modest training program for Georgian forces.

The U.S. will provide Georgian troops it trains with uniforms, small arms, ammunition, communications equipment, training and medical gear, fuel and construction materials.

Georgia says some 2,000 soldiers and officers will go through the program, the equivalent of around four battalions of infantry and border guards, plus staff training for land forces command and defense ministry personnel.

Field training is expected for about three to four weeks over the summer covering maneuvers, construction of defensive sites, and offensive operations, U.S. officials say.

Border guards and other Georgian security agencies will also take part to ensure all the country's security forces can operate together in the field.

The dispatch of U.S. instructors to boost the fighting capacity of Georgian troops was seen as a diplomatic coup for Georgia's veteran President Eduard Shevardnadze.

Moscow has been itching to send its own troops into the Pankisi Gorge to hunt down Chechen guerrillas, but with post-independence relations between Tbilisi and Moscow prickly at best, the former Soviet foreign minister has so far refused to let in Russian soldiers.

Already strained ties were further tested earlier this month when, uninvited, Russia sent in dozens of heavily-armed peacekeepers to another remote Georgian gorge on the edge of the rebel region of Abkhazia which aligns itself with Moscow.

The troops pulled out within 24 hours, but some analysts saw the move as a blunt signal to Tbilisi that as it cozied up to Washington it should not forget its neighbor to the north.

Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh said last Sunday that U.S. military advisers had begun training Yemeni troops hunting remnants of Al Qaeda. Meanwhile some 1,000 American troops are holding counter-terrorism exercises with Filipino troops fighting Abu Sayyef Muslim rebels on Basilan island.

 
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