On the morning of Feb. 22, assailants attacked the motorcade of the president of the breakaway Georgian territory of Abkhazia. The attack occurred on the road from President Alexander Ankvab's hometown of Gudauta to his office in Sukhumi, approximately 40 kilometers (25 miles) away. The five-car motorcade was initially attacked with an improvised explosive device (IED) followed by a volley of machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Two of the president's guards were killed in the attack and a third was severely wounded. The attack appears to have been fairly well coordinated. It is not easy to time the detonation of an IED so precisely to hit a moving vehicle and disable it. Additionally, gunmen had established a position over the road from which to fire on the motorcade from above, giving them the advantage of higher ground. However, the attack was unsuccessful in killing the likely target — the president. Where the attackers failed was in adequately blocking the escape route of the remaining vehicles in the motorcade. The attackers pursued a linear ambush rather than an "L" shaped ambush that would have cut off the escape route and given the gunmen above the road more time to fire on a stationary target. As it was, it appears that the assailants relied on the IED to block the route of escape. While the IED does appear to have disabled the lead car, it obviously did not prevent the president's vehicle from going around it to flee the scene. Credit is also due to the president's protective detail. Ankvab has been targeted at least five other times over the past seven years — two of those attempts were on the exact same road using similar tactics to the Feb. 22 attack. Two other attacks targeted him while he was in his vehicle. With so many cases to reference, Ankvab's protective team had the experience to know how to escape from the attack.
