U.S. troops to train Georgians

In the latest expansion of the U.S.-led war on terrorism to a little-noticed corner of the globe, about 50 Green Berets landed Sunday in the capital of the Georgian republic to help train its impoverished and ill-equipped army to oppose Chechen guerrilla groups.

Over the next year, the Army Special Forces are to instruct 2,000 soldiers and officers in a bid to create an effective antiterrorist fighting force in the mountainous Caucasus region that has become home to some Arab and Chechen fighters supporting Osama bin Laden.

Russia has long complained that Georgia's lawless Pankisi Gorge, which adjoins Chechnya, has provided sanctuary for Islamic separatists.

Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze asked for the U.S. trainers this year. Shevardnadze, who was foreign minister of the Soviet Union in its last years, has tried to tilt his country toward closer relations with the United States. But it has been a delicate balance to avoid offending stronger and better-off Russia.

The soldiers and officers to be trained will represent an elite 10 percent of the country's armed forces.

Defense Ministry representatives and U.S. Embassy personnel greeted the Special Forces troops out of Fort Carson, Colo., as they disembarked from a C-17 transport.

After settling in for one week, the instructors are to launch into 70 days of staff training for the first group of Georgian army officers.

After that, the Americans will carry out four back-to-back tactical training programs lasting about 100 days each for special-forces, commando and mountain battalions, and for a motorized rifle brigade. Plans call for up to 150 U.S. military instructors to be in Georgia at any one time.

Officials stressed that the U.S. troops would not be traveling to the Pankisi Gorge or engage in combat.

In the eight-month war on terrorism, U.S. troops have established bases in formerly Soviet Central Asia. An antiterrorist training mission also has begun in the Philippines, and U.S. military instructors are preparing to be sent to Yemen.

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