… by Henry Kamens, … with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow
The isolated Pansiki Gorge is perfect as a permanent Western terrorist staging base
[ Editor’s note: We get a major peek behind the curtain from Henry Kamens today, a trip to one of the headwaters of modern terrorism where unknowing American taxpayers have been footing the bill.
We have all heard about Chechen terrorists showing up among Jihadi movements and have assumed they were recruited and operated by the well-known Gulf terrorist states, the Saudis and Qatar.
And while we were aware this was done with the full knowledge and complicity of the US and NATO, great efforts have been made to keep America’s terror training base in the Republic of Georgia out of the news.
The dwindling pool of real investigative journalists has been culled down a little more when sticking their noses into this den of thieves in the Pankisi Gorge. While most democratic state publics seem to be in a constant state of semi-hypnosis on world affairs, one thing would wake them up quickly…
…And that is to learn their taxes are going not only to fight the staged Wars on Terror, but have been used to fund the creation, operations and target selection of many of those groups.
One of the things so many never picked up on regarding Syria was, with the constant mentioning of the West’s problem of organizing and controlling 1000 different militia groups fighting the Syrian Army, no one seem interested in the next obvious question.
“Yes, these are some rough and tough dudes.”
If “they” know that 1000 opposition groups are there, then they should know more about who they are, where they came from, how they got started, and who their main support comes from.
You will learn below in Henry’s article that “they” don’t like to see questions like this even being asked in the media, much less answered… and they aren’t.
As for Congressional oversight… forget about that. They are among some of the most compromised people on the planet, and will remain that way for some time… and the same goes for most of corporate media. It has “gone over” as VT readers know, and with no boycotting from advertisers either.
And yes, while their market share has been dwindling, they aren’t going anywhere, as that decline has pushed them into the web; and their Intel buddies have flooded the web with controlled asset sites to use as needed to attack whom they want and seed bogus stories.
Alternative media is under attack, with Prison Planet being the compromised star of that show. But Net readers are generally savvy. Although they can’t always see through the smoke and mirrors quickly, they eventually figure it out.
VT has had its share of knocks but “they” have not been able to get their hooks into us. They hate us…and we love every minute of that… Jim W. Dean]
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“I’m not here for a long time… I’m here for a good time” — George Strait
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– First published … October 19, 2014 –
Pankisi Gorge
The media is awash with expert commentary on the various world trouble spots. Many of the reports you see make similar claims about the presence of ethnic Chechens amongst the various fighting forces in Iraq, Syria, Kenya, Ukraine and other war-torn states that the US has vested interests in. However there is one point all these authors have missed.
On September 1, Iraqi News reported that “Iraq’s counter-terrorism office announced the killing of 23 fighters of Chechen nationality who belong to the organization of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in Sulaiman Bek district, east of Tikrit.”(1)
Whether these people were really Chechens has not been established, as “Chechen” has been equated with “terrorist” for a long time; so if you don’t know where a dead terrorist comes from he is called a Chechen. But there is a reason this state of affairs came to be, and it does not derive from Russian propaganda, as sources such as Arab News try and make out.
On June 23, The Barefoot Strategist drew attention to the fact that “While most of the world is focused on the battle between Assad and the Syrian rebels, Chechens are becoming known as some of the best fighters in Syria. Their prominence is growing, and it is alarming.”(2) This article detailed how the Chechens had split into different groups, some pro- and some anti-ISIL, based on their original allegiances. However it did not say why these Chechens were interested in Syria and how they got there, or how they became such good fighters.
On July 22, Cristina Maza, writing in The Balkanist, stated that “according to Murad Batal al-Shishani, a London-based expert on Islamic groups and a specialist on Islamic movements in Chechnya, the majority(3) of the Chechen fighters in Syria right now are from the Pankisi Gorge.”(4)
The article also pointed out that “the number of residents in the region — Pankisi — has doubled over the past decade due to an influx of refugees from Chechnya.” It described how they are “volunteering” to fight in Syria, encouraged by “radicals” and lack of opportunity in the gorge.
Once again however the article failed to mention why the Chechens and — even some Saudi nationals — suddenly took such an interest in this part of Georgia, if there are so few opportunities there.
The point everyone is missing is what I have been saying for more than 10 years is being proven true every day. The Chechens being recruited in the Pankisi Gorge did not end up there by accident — they were inserted by the CIA and funded and trained in terrorist warfare by the CIA in order to destabilise other countries the US was interested in. Those same Chechens are not volunteering for service, but are being sent there by the US, as part of a coordinated plan, to serve US interests, and being moved around to wherever they are needed.
Roddy Scott, a young British journalist and filmmaker, was killed for knowing and saying this — and that was no accident either. He was following the money and weapons — the NGO mechanism used to fund the freedom fighters and provide fake passports to people who, based on the American definition, were terrorists. So let us consider the facts.
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Safe haven for chosen terrorists
Train and Equip Program, 2003 — Former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
From 2001 onwards, an extensive media campaign was conducted by international outlets which claimed that Pankisi, which none of those reporters had previously seen, was a “terrorist haven”.
No actual evidence was provided to support this, but it made people feel better to think all the terrorists came from one place and it had been identified.
These reports were used as the justification for sending US military advisers to Pankisi in April 2002, purportedly on a mission to contain al-Qaeda loyalists who might have been operating there. It is only after this, however, that most of the Chechens, who were later branded as terrorists, actually moved to this isolated valley, as Cristina Maza’s article(4) implies.
The US intervention there would therefore seem to have been an utter failure, which would cause heads to roll. However, the sudden influx of terrorists was used as the excuse for the establishment of the $64-million Train and Equip Program. This provided precious few weapons to the Georgian Armed Forces and their “training” was exposed for what it was during the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.
It has, however, led to a succession of fearsome Chechen warriors, highly-trained, well-armed and successful, emerging from the gorge and appearing in US-backed wars all over the region, as the articles cited state.
This activity was not hidden. Within weeks reports about what was really going on there, dismissed as rumour at the time, started appearing. Nikolaus von Twickel of the Moscow Times soon reported that Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officials had confirmed that Ramzan Turkoshvili, 34, a Russian citizen born in Georgia, had been coordinating the activities of illegal armed groups in the Northern Caucasus by order of Tbilisi.
He told Itar-Tass that the Pankisi Gorge, “despite repeated statements of the Georgian leadership and their Western allies, is still used as a base of terrorists acting in the North Caucasus and by various terrorist and extremist organisations.
Ringleaders of terrorist groups from the Georgian territory provide financial support to bandit groups, coordinate activities for the preparation of terrorist acts, as well as recruiting Muslim youth of the Akhmed districts of Georgia and involving them in extremist activities.”
One of the Chechens who appeared in Pankisi Gorge at that time was Imran Akhmadov. When journalists such as Jeffrey Silverman — who was then working as an editor-and-chief of the Georgian Times — followed up on his Chechen and intelligence connections, they were told that he had been killed by the FSB. Not only is Akhmadov still alive, he is one of the leaders of ISIL.
He had in fact been provided with a fake Georgian passport under the name Kavtarashvili, and shipped to Turkey by the US Embassy when people started enquiring about him. The snipers in Maidan Square, who shot at everyone indiscriminately and were also described as Chechens, were similarly removed from the scene and sent to Syria on fake Georgian passports, after it was reported that they were neither protesters nor Ukrainian security services personnel.
Akhmadov’s brother was also reported killed by the FSB, as if to provide support for the claim that Imran had died. Not only is the brother still alive, he is a senior Georgian intelligence operative. As official investigations are now revealing, he was involved in the planning of the prospective murder of tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili — obviously not a matter for low level operatives.
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Knowing too much
Roddy Scott
It was in October 2002 that Roddy Scott, while making a documentary, accompanied the Chechens as they crossed from Georgia into the Russian republic of Ingushetia.
The 31-year-old journalist was killed while filming a firefight between Chechen fighters and the Russian army in the village of Galashka in the Ingush region of the Russian Federation. No stranger to hot spots, Scott worked for the British company Frontline TV, and knew how to protect himself.
Scott had made no secret of the fact that he felt the wrong information about Pankisi was being reported in the West. He had written to a friend shortly before he left:
“I personally think it’s a great story. It’s about the first time I have ever seen the possibility for someone to really lift the lid on everything, rather than the usual ‘journo-grasping-at-straws-with-no-good-sources’, which seems to emanate from the region. And what really gives it the boost is that it is tied into US policy, which gives it the international rather than local/parochial flavor.
As you saw, there are plenty of boyeviks — terrorists/fighters — in Pankisi, and pretty much they operate openly; but the story has never really come out because most journals don’t have access. And there is a real danger of kidnapping if you are there too long without the protection of a Chechen commander.
Equally, the Chechens have a vested interest in making sure the full story never comes out (in print, photos or TV). It’s the kind of thing that might just provoke the Russians to do something — or give them excuse, I guess.”
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Investigative journalist Jeffrey Silverman
After the rebelswere driven back, Russian Federal Forces found Scott’s body. Any such death is generally investigated. When Jeffrey Silverman, who had been one of Scott’s sources in Georgia, started asking deep questions, he was warned by a former employee of the BBC (and possibly MI6, the British intelligence service) as follows:
“Your digging around Roddy has no such safety net, be careful. His mother’s appetite for information will never be satisfied, make sure you know where the limits are – and when to stop digging.
I do it because I am a hired gun; I always have a focus, and a programme to deliver at the end of the day. Don’t get too carried away chasing shadows without a clear aim. Didn’t mean for this to turn into a lecture – just be careful, and know why you are taking risks.”
Nor was Scott’s an isolated case. As a Moscow-based US journalist later reported, “I would not take any of the stories about Pankisi seriously – Roddy Scott and I worked on what was going on there some years ago, and it got him killed.”
The dime was dropped on Roddy by an American working for OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), who intentionally shared information with GRU, Russian Military Intelligence about the mass movement of Chechens.
The result wasthat Scott ended up dead and Silverman was beaten up – even arrested getting off an airplane in the United States and held in total isolation while a secret court hearing took place, in an effort to try to strip him of his US passport and ability to work as a journalist.
Why would such action be taken against anyone? Clearly, the American OSCE Operative was not seeking to prevent acts of terrorism being carried out, by monitoring the Georgian-Russian international border during this period, as his mandate would have obliged him to do.
He, and the compromised Danish General who controlled him, wanted to make sure that the story Scott was working on would never be told in the West and that his treasure trove of information on what was happening in Pankisi would go to the grave with him.
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First hand
Georgian military in front of Georgia Parliament’s giant eyeball
I have been to Pankisi Gorge and lived with the locals for weeks on end. I have seen the Georgian military supposedly cracking down on terrorists by patrolling with no bullets in their weapons.
I have seen the newcomers — the Chechen terrorists, Arab nationals — the cars they drive, their clothes, and their flats in Tbilisi. None of them work, and they can not live like that on remittances from relatives abroad or herding sheep.
I have also further investigated the Akhmadov brothers. They were involved in the kidnapping of two Polish journalists who might have stumbled on the story — Zofis Fischer and Ewa Marchwinska-Wyrwal — the kidnapping of two Spanish businessmen; and in the faked abduction of British banker Peter Shaw, who staged it himself.
The murder of Anthony Russo, an Italian journalist, also remains unresolved, and has never been properly investigated, like all the other cases linked with the Akhmadov brothers.
None of this is coincidence. The appearance of Chechens from the Pankisi Gorge, who moved there after the US sent people to root out terrorists used in all the wars the US is involved in… is not coincidence. America has put those people in those places to conduct whatever terrorist operations serve its interests, even if it means sacrificing those same terrorists.
All we are seeing now is part of a long lasting, coordinated programme of state-sponsored terrorism conducted by the guardians of freedom and democracy, using people it labels as terrorists whom it has armed and trained to do all these things. Iraq, Syria, Ukraine — all the conflicts we are seeing are part of the same programme.
I’ve been saying all this for a very long time. A lot of people have a vested interest in proving me wrong, and will give anyone trying to do so all possible assistance. Go ahead, the world is waiting — Make my day!
Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.
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