"A glimpse at the problems of coalition building: Tbilisi would like to help fight ISIS, but weighs the many risks from its own jihadists - and from Russia," reports The Daily Beast.
GHN offers extract from article:
"An echo of the ISIS war reached the nation of Georgia again this week. A local television channel, Rustavi-2, reported that yet another teenager had been killed in Syria: 18-year-old Beso Kushanashvili would not be coming home to his family in the Pankisi Gorge, the mountain area of Georgia mostly populated with Chechen Muslims. Kushanashvili, according to local reports, was one of about 50 teenagers between 16 and 18 who had left to fight the jihadist war in Syria.
Two other Georgian citizens appeared among 21 individuals on the U.S. sanctions list on Thursday, including a key military leader of the so-called Islamic State, the red-bearded Tarkhan Batirashvili a.k.a. Abu Omar.
It's not surprising that the United States is looking for Georgia's help fighting this developing terrorist menace. This country sitting between Turkey and the troubled Russian provinces of Dagestan and Chechnya is home to scores of young Muslims who've joined the international jihad today. And Georgia would be very interested in helping the U.S. and Arab military forces to win the struggle against ISIS. But that doesn't mean it will.
The discussions surrounding the question of Georgian cooperation with the American-led effort to fight ISIS give a glimpse into the enormous complications of pulling together a broad coalition, weighed down as they are by past disappointments as well as present and future concerns.
Earlier this week word leaked that Georgia had offered to host training camps for the supposedly moderate Syrian rebels that the United States wants to see trained to fight ISIS on the one hand, and eventually the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad on the other.
But as soon as this development was reported in Reuters, the New York Times and Foreign Policy, Georgian officials attending the U.N. General Assembly in New York and the political establishment in Tbilisi suddenly realized that if they did such a thing - especially if they did it publicly - they would fid themselves not only in the crosshairs of ISIS and its ferocious partisans, but of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is a strong supporter of Assad. They quickly denied that any such offer had been made at all. The government press service denied to The Daily Beast on Thursday that such camps for Syrian fighters were planned and the country's defense ministry referred to the subject as "too sensitive" to discuss.
Then there was the question of a quid pro quo.
Ever since Georgia's 2008 war with Russia, which it lost badly, it has become pragmatic. Living as they do in the heart of the volatile Caucasus, Georgians are only too aware of the fires that surround them. By helping out American forces in the war against both ISIS and Assad, former deputy defense minister Nodar Kharshiladze told The Daily Beast on Thursday, Georgia "automatically becomes a target for Islamist organizations" and raises the dangerous ire of the pro-Assad Kremlin."