During a visit to the valley in December, 2013, DFWatch was told by the elderly people that 80-90 percent of the youth are following Wahhabism, which was their biggest worry.
In Duisi, there was also a prevalence of bearded young men, dressed in specific orthodox style. Although many people there have a more moderate lifestyle, the rise of the radicalisms is quite visible and the prominence of Pankisi men among top ranks of Middle Eastern terrorists is a proof of this.
Pankisi Gorge was the cradle of some of the most infamous Islamist leaders among groups active in the Middle East. One of them, Tarkhan Batirashvili, aka Abu Umar al-Shishani, is head of the military wing of the Islamic State in Syria, though also actively participating in hostilities in Iraq; another one is Murad (Muslim) Margoshvili, aka Muslim al-Shishani, commander of the Junud al-Sham group, affiliated with al-Nursa front, an official branch of al-Qaeda in Syria, and designated as terrorists by the United States.
What? Radical terrorist Islam in Georgia?
Who woulda thunk it?
Especially two decades ago, oh yeah...
Pankisi Gorge bordering Chechnya was a kind of safe heaven for Chechen terrorists operating in Russia for more than two decades. It is also an important transit point for Arab terrorists infiltrating into Russia. All of the above were a primary reason of ‘imperialist’ incursions of Russian air forces into ‘little proud democracy’s’ airspace from late 1990s until 2008. And of course, all these ‘innocent victims of evil Russian aggression’ are either Islamists themselves or their supporters because it is hardly believable that they have allowed any other group to live there upon takeover.
Interesting fact, a US military involvement in Georgia under ‘Train and Equip’ program was officially announced as a response to a Russian plea to the Georgian government to kick some Islamist butt resolving a Pankisi problem on their own. In practice this program ended with a Georgian defence budget inflated 30-fold all at the the US taxpayer dime with hundreds of tanks, IFVs, howitzers, even landing crafts and warships purchased (all suitable to a counterinsurgency and mountain warfare - not).
It is nice to learn that Islamists are alive a well after a decade of USMC presence and billions of dollars in aid wasted.
A little factcheck: Pankisi is a northern end of a Georgian Alasani Valley easily accessible by car from Georgia. It is some three miles wide and less than twenty miles long, populated by only a several thousand people in a few villages.
A few thousand troops reinforced by a dozen migration officials would clean every alien in a couple of days out of there without any specific training and equipment.
Yet, Chechens somehow managed to assemble at times a formations of up to four thousand heavily armed terrorists arriving to Georgia and gathering there for months one by one for their attacks. It is hard to believe that Georgian authorities were unaware or interested to resolve.