Pankisi Gorge crisis

The Pankisi Gorge crisis was a geopolitical dispute between Russia and Georgia concerning the presence of armed Chechen separatists and jihadists in Georgia, that peaked in 2002.

At the centre of the crisis was a contingent of Chechen separatist militants who sought shelter from Russian forces in the Pankisi Gorge area of Georgia, 25 miles south of Chechnya in the Russian Federation. Alongside the separatists were jihadists with alleged links to Al-Qaeda and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

From November 2000, Russian officials demanded that Georgia suppress the rebels by force and extradite any captives. They later threatened to invade the Pankisi Gorge to achieve those objectives if Georgia could or would not do so.

Rejecting Russia's demands, Georgian officials said that an armed operation in the Gorge could spark destabilising ethnic conflict, and told the U.S. that they did not have the military capacity to impose order there. Georgia also linked the issue to their own demand that Russia withdraw support from secessionists in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia.

As part of the nascent War on Terror, the United States, like Russia, wanted Georgia to regain control of the Gorge, both to suppress the jihadist threat and to contain the escalation in Georgia-Russian tensions. However it also wanted to protect Georgia's sovereignty against Russian influence and to integrate Georgia within a U.S.-led international bloc. The U.S. set up a train-and-equip program, which it described as intended to help Georgia's military assert itself in the Gorge, and which also helped prepare Georgian troops to fight alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over the course of the crisis, Georgian special forces acting on U.S. intelligence conducted at least two operations to arrest suspected jihadists.

Pressure on Georgia to act peaked in mid-2002, with a series of Russian airstrikes on Pankisi and several U.S. statements that Georgia must act. The Georgian authorities initiated a major security operation in the Gorge, which was communicated to the militants in advance. With no reported shots fired between the Georgian and the separatist-jihadist forces, the latter began to leave Georgian territory in September 2002. Together with Georgia's extradition of five alleged separatist militants, this caused tensions with Russia to subside to below crisis-level that October.

Shortly afterward, Western intelligence agencies came to believe that some of the jihadists who had made their base in the Gorge had initiated plots to conduct attacks on Europe using the lethal nerve agent ricin and other biological weapons. The claim had a prominent place in the U.S.'s public case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While no ricin was ever found in Europe, a number of jihadists who had passed through Pankisi were convicted of involvement in terrorist plots in France.