Georgia is busy pondering the legal options to discourage its citizens from joining the jihad in Syria, which allegedly has attracted dozens of recruits from the country’s remote Pankisi Gorge, a predominantly Muslim area.
“It is going to be a preventive mechanism to make sure our citizens know that if they participate in illegal foreign military formations…the state will take measures against them,” said Parliamentary Committee for Defense and Security Chairperson Irakli Sesiashvili. Rustavi2 reported. The nature of the “measures” remains unknown, but they could entail tougher administrative and criminal penalties.
The announcement came as news hit about the alleged death of another alleged Pankisi-fighter in Syria, the eighth to date.
The actual impact of such a law is open to interpretation, however.
Addressing “endemic poverty and radical (usually foreign) influencers” could prove a more effective way of tackling the issue of Pankisi residents heading to Syria, one analyst familiar with Georgia, Michael H. Cecire of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, commented to RFE/RL.
The number of Islamic-war recruits from Pankisi (and, reportedly, from Muslim communities in the Black-Sea region of Achara) reportedly remains low, but it has resulted in embarrassment for Georgia’s plans to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The Georgian government supposedly offered to host Syrian rebels for training to fight the Islamic State, though officials vehemently denied such reports.
Their denials, though, have not quieted speculation about the Gorge, a little-visited strip of land that borders on Russia’s Chechnya.
One of the Islamic State’s most prominent commanders is the Pankisi-born Tarkhan Batirashvili, known by his nom de guerre of Omar al-Shishani. Batirashvili is believed to have blazed the trail for other recruits from Pankisi.
He has been pronounced dead several times, including by flamboyant Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, but no confirmation has come from Batirashvili’s family in Pankisi.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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