Escape from Olkhon Island

The title of this blog relates to a travel mishap made while going through Russia, which I recount here. Myself and my friend Alex had travelled from Moscow to Irkutsk, on our way to Mongolia. At Irkutsk we met an odd eccentric by the name of Karl Widerquist. At the beat up hotel over a typically unsatisfying dinner, he said he was going to a place called Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal, and wondered if we wanted to join him. Being tied to no set itinerary apart from a flight booked from Hong Kong in several weeks, we decided to join him.

We arrived at the bus station, which was run by an old Soviet soldier, or who at least gave an impression of running it, sitting behind his counter with his Army uniform on and a generic Communist flag draped across the wall behind him. His gesticulations to us were incomprehensible and probably influenced by prodiguous quantities of alcohol. Piling into a beat up bus that took us on a fairly uncomfortable 8 hour ride to the ferry stop. On the ferry we met a young Russian couple who were genuinely shocked that we were travelling on a totally ad hoc basis. Upon arrival at Olkhon Island - I'm not one for effusive and eloquent landscape descriptions - it was bleak. The one town was bleak - beat up wood/pre-fab constrcutions, dirt roads, rest of the island failry nondescript - some copses, mostly grassland. Lake Baikal was amazing, after so much time going through Siberia, a great block of pure blue streching all sides into the horizon.

We walked past a fight between drunks on our way to the lodging place (a proper fight, with the two guys slugging it out with each other, drunken pugilists with blood on their faces). Our lodgings were in fact in one of these basic houses, which was acually pretty nice.

The mishap proper began the next morning, where in our desire to have a look around we thought it an idea to venture to the northern tip of the island, have a bit of a walk around, and then come back.

In short, this is a to be continued post...but what's coming up: a) attempted robbery by our driver and his mates, b) running out of water in the middle of the biggest freshwater lake in the world c) stumbling across a deserted farm d) hitching a lift back with a Buryat who tried to fleece us, left us in his home village with three of his very large and very drunk friends e) escaping from that situation to spend an evening on the beach singing songs with Russian teenagers f) nearly missing the twice weekly bus off the island, and then finally escaping from Olkhon Island.

The recent report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that estimates the number of foreign insurgents at c.3,000 should come as no surprise. After the conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir featured foreign contingents travelling to fight against infidels etc, coupled with the porous nature of Iraq's borders, it is somewhat surprising that more have not joined Zarqawi and the nexus of other terrorist groups operating in the country. The presence of these foreigners in Iraq is causing terrible pain and suffering to Iraqis, made evident by the carnage endured every day. A wider question must be asked - when will this suffering be transported by those same brutalised insurgents in a bleedback effect to their home countries (as sketched out by BBC security correspondent Frank Garder in his comments at the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee)? Already this past week in Jordan the bombings in Amman were claimed by Zarqawi, himself a Jordanian. The report specifies that foreign fighters hail from countries such as Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Algeria - these all have experienced problems with home grown Islamist radicals committed to violence. When these fighters return from Iraq, it is certain that they will seek to export the horrific methods used and developed in Iraq back to these countries. Extrapolating this potential deadly trend further, the experience of Afghanistan may well prove an awful contrast to Iraq. While there is not a large scale state within a state and network of terrorist training camps run by Al-Qaeda in Iraq as was the case in Afghanistan, Iraq is currently an 'on-the-job' training ground for terrorists. In Afghanistan one of the destinations of these trained terrorists was the World Trade Centre. How long will it be before a similar pattern is repeated in Iraq?

This is a smaller picture of a situation that is characterised by the fact that the insurgency is 'home grown'. But at the same time, the mujahadeen in Afghanistan since 1979 were home grown, with foreign fighters and Al-Qaeda arriving later. In Iraq foreigners and Al-Qaeda are already there after only two years, and while they have their murderous work cut out for them against the coalition armies in place there, the nascent Iraqi security forces, and mainly Shia Iraqi civilians, unfortunately there will be someone who is planning to sow destruction abroad as part of the wider picture in the war on terror.

One might argue that this kind of planning may be harder in Iraq than Afghanistan, due to the 100,000+ coalition troops and Iraqi forces operating in the country, compared to the free rein Al Qaeda had with the tacit proctection of the Taliban regime. The reality appears to be that some parts of Iraq are totally out of the US army and Iraqi force's reaches. In the absence of any semblance of control, it does not take much to believe that terrorists and insurgents, both Iraqi and foreign, are using this vacuum to great effect, and while it appears the vacuum is being used at the moment to plan and execute attacks inside Iraq, it may be that even more deadly plans are being concocted.

Is there a solution to this scenario? While it is too broad a question to answer whether another 'Al Qaeda spectacular' can be prevented, the likelihood of such an attack would probably be diminished by the curtailment of foreign insurgents getting into Iraq. Even this however would not prevent them from planning terroist outrages in their own countries. And sealing tightly shut the borders of Iraq is no easy exercise given the wide ranging commitments of forces inside Iraq. But the issue should be addressed head on - while home grown insurgents may have taken up arms to fight against US forces and a Shia dominated Iraq, foreign fighters primary motivation will be the same, but it will only be a matter of time before the motivation changes towards planning and executing attacks against Middle Eastern countries and the West itself.

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