Word: post-soviet
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...illicit trade - have contributed to a decline in the past 20 years. Before the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, that country and Iran controlled the world caviar market. They invested heavily in maintaining fish stocks, and tracking the source of any shipment was straightforward. In the post-Soviet era, though, that system collapsed and private entrepreneurs moved...
...tons of caviar from five sturgeon species. The legal trade is estimated at about $100 million a year - a figure believed to have been dwarfed at least 10 or 12 times over in recent years by the illegal catch in the four former Soviet republics. In the first post-Soviet decade, poaching evolved into a lucrative, high-stakes business, with abundant illegal canneries and "caviar Mafias" in places like the Russian republic of Dagestan...
...1990s, intelligence sources tell TIME, bin Laden's agents began cruising the black markets of Europe and Asia looking for pirated Russian warheads. Al-Qaeda also made it known that loose components such as enriched uranium would do too. Relatively new to the free-for-all thieving of the post-Soviet republics, bin Laden was fleeced at least twice, getting fooled by black marketeers who tried to sell him low-grade, radioactive rubbish--in one instance claiming it was "red mercury," a fictional Russian weapon...
...days. Where American pundits had been fretting over the ability of U.S. air power to dislodge the Taliban, the Northern Alliance finally stepped up to their role as the all-important infantry component of the campaign. Before September 11, they'd been the beleaguered remnants of the first post-Soviet government, outnumbered and outgunned by the Taliban and fighting simply to survive in a tiny sliver of land along Afghanistan's northeastern border. Two months later, thanks largely to U.S. air and logistical support, it controls half the country and appears to have effectively ended Taliban rule...
...fate of Abdul Haq should serve as a powerful antidote. Few knew how to fight in the rugged Afghan steppes and summits better than Haq, a legendary mujahedin guerrilla who lost his right foot to a land mine while helping rout the Soviets. He left Afghanistan during the post-Soviet power struggle and renounced politics after his wife and son were murdered in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home. But he recently returned to the Afghan frontier, hoping to enlist defectors and warlords in an anti-Taliban southern alliance. Because he was Pashtun--the dominant tribe of southern Afghanistan and the Taliban...