The Chechen resistance movement is an outgrowth of the Chechen Mafia. Nukhayev is a former mobster who has been in and out of prison since the 1970s. The Mafia and the oligarchs are not exactly unacquainted. Read Klebnikov's book on Berezovsky (Godfather of the Kremlin)! It's all in there.
--- Michael was just asking how the Russian oligarchs would go about making use of Chechen freedom fighters; my point was only that, in general, there is a surprisingly efficient global community of violent men and no particular instance of thugs of two kinds working together ought to necessarily be regarded as surprising. The Korea-Birmingham(UK) connection was the subject of an episode of Panorama a couple of weeks ago, which is why it stuck in my mind. NB that the "Official" IRA is not the same thing as the "Provisional" IRA which put the bombs in pubs (and neither is the same as the "Real IRA" which is the only currently active nationalist terrorist group), and that the Officials have been basically dormant since the 1980s. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
