U.s. Media Reports On Chechen Fighters Discounted

Muradov also spoke skeptically of reports in some American media last week that as many as 2,000 separatist guerrillas might leave Chechnya in the near future to fight U.S. forces in Iraq. The only fighters who might possibly leave Chechnya to wage war elsewhere, he said, would be not the Chechens themselves but the foreign Islamic adventurers who have gone there in order to join the struggle against the Russians. At this point, emphasized Muradov, there are only a few dozen such Arabs and other foreigners in Chechnya, “and they are mostly involved in money, not in fighting.”