I lived in Boston for half a year. As a runner I am touched and pray for the victims. The fact is 3 innocent people are killed. many people lost limbs. many lives are shattered and even the suspects families is shattered. Why they did it or who was behind it or if they were framed does not change the fact that people were killed and many lives changed. What can we do as people whether we are muslims, catholics, christians, jews, Buddhists, Taoists, etc etc is simply pray for a better future. This is one thing we should do, .there are people crying for their lost loved ones right now. let’s respect the victims and honor their families. But there are simple questions, for the future if you go for the Munich Oktoberfest or Boston Marathon. This recipe for those a homemade bomb constructed and deployed in Boston was clearly well established in jihadist magazines and is a standard improvised explosive device (IED). Most interesting would be the detonating mechanism. The bomb seems to be very much like roadside bombs, a common use of IEDs. Chechnya connections build piece by piece a picture of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Are they self radicalized loners or part of a larger a terrorist group?
Given all the mayhem the two brothers are allegedly responsible for: Two bombings that caused three deaths and some two hundred injuries at the Boston Marathon as well as the subsequent murder of a policeman at MIT, did they have some kind of additional help?
Investigators will surely combing through the e-mail traffic of the Tsarnaev brothers to see if they either reached out to militant Islamist clerics or downloaded lectures by such clerics. They will also examine the brothers’ Internet usage to see if they visited jihadist forums or downloaded propaganda from al Qaeda or other allied groups. And of course, it’s possible their decision to carry out the attacks was reached without any outside influence and help.
What is interesting is, that the FBI interviewed one of the Boston marathon bombing suspects in 2011 at the request of a foreign government, as reported. Officials told the Associated Press, Reuters and CNN that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a shootout with police outside Boston on Friday morning, was interviewed by federal officers. The matter was closed when it did not produce any incriminating information. One official told AP that the FBI shared its information with the foreign government. The brothers had not previously been on the radar as possible militants, US government officials said, but on Friday night, US President Barack Obama spoke with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, by telephone. There were hints earlier in the day that Russian officials were helping American investigators research the brothers.
How do you square the multiple descriptions of the brothers as “good guys” with nails in the IED?
No surprise then that we are hearing positive characterizations of the brothers Tsarnaev. It’s worth recalling that Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the suicide attackers who bombed the London transit system in 2005 killing 52 commuters, was a beloved teacher at a primary school in the northern city of Leeds who taught children with developmental problems, and the happily married 30-year-old father of a baby daughter. Colleagues and acquaintances described Khan as a gentle, kind man.
But were there just nice?
“A picture has begun to emerge of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an aggressive, possibly radicalized immigrant who may have ensnared his younger brother Dzhokhar — described almost universally as a smart and sweet kid — into an act of terror,” The Boston Globe reported Friday.
Both brothers left internet evidence that showed their deep ties to the republic. The last entry on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s page on VKontakte, posted on 19 March, shows a video of his brother humorously imitating various accents from the region, in fluent Russian. It shows that among the three groups to which he belongs are “Chechen’s” and “Chechnya: Everything about the Chechen Republic”. Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s links run even deeper. A YouTube account that appears to have been run by the elder Tsarnaev includes a playlist devoted to Timur Mutsuraev, a Chechen singer now in exile who sang of the republic’s battle for freedom from Russia. His account also includes a playlist devoted to “terrorism”, including one video in English entitled “The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags from Khorasan”. He also maintained a playlist devoted to Islam.
The Globe quoted a person named Zaur Tsarnaev, who the newspaper said identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin of the suspects, as saying, “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good.” Tamerlan “was always getting into trouble,” he added. “He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. He hurt her a few times. He was not a nice man. I don’t like to speak about him. He caused problems for my family.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested for domestic assault and battery in 2009 after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, according to police records. A YouTube account linked with his Google Plus profile is focused on videos about Islam.
Here is a photo gallery of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, training at Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts in Allston, Mass. The gallery is entitled, “Will Box For Passport,” and it was produced while Tamerlan was training to compete in the National Golden Gloves competition in Salt Lake City.
Some of the captions provide a glimpse into his persona:
- Tamerlan said: “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.”
- He said he wanted to become an engineer.
- A goal was to box for the U.S. Olympic team, for which he said he’d rather compete than his native Russia’s team.
- “Tamerlan fled Chechnya with his family because of the conflict in the early ’90s, and lived for years in Kazakhstan before getting to the United States as a refugee.”
- He described himself as “very religious,” and said he did not drink or smoke.
- 3. Did the brothers have any training or practice on explosives?
But what about that image of Dzhokhar as sweet?
On Friday, BuzzFeed and CNN claimed to verify Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The tweets posted on that account give a window into a bifurcated mind — on one level, a 19-year-old boy, but on another, a person with a mind leaning toward darkness.
Like many young people, the person tweeting from that account liked rap music, saying of himself, “#imamacbookrapper when I’m bored,” and quoting rap lyrics in his tweets.
He was a proud Muslim who tweeted about going to mosque and enjoying talking — and even arguing — about religion with others. But he seemed to believe that different faiths were in competition with one another. On Nov. 29, he tweeted: “I kind of like religious debates, just hearing what other people believe is interesting and then crushing their beliefs with facts is fun.”
His politics seemed jumbled. He was apparently a 9/11 Truther, posting a tweet on Sept. 1 that read in part, “Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job.” On Election Day he retweeted a tweet from Barack Obama that read: “This happened because of you. Thank you.” But on March 20 he tweeted, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had strong views on the Middle East, tweeting on Nov. 28, “Free Palestine.” Later that day he tweeted, “I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate.”
It seems unlikely that the perpetrators would have been able to successfully set off two deadly bombs within seconds of each other without some sort of training or practice. Bomb-making recipes certainly exist on the Internet, but actually building effective bombs is generally a skill that requires some training or practice, and even then a successful detonation is not guaranteed. The older Tsarnaev brother, Tamerlan, spent six months in Russia last year. What precisely he did there will surely be of intense interest to investigators. The purpose of his extended trip abroad and wherabouts are unknown. Authorities are interested in the possibility that Tamerlan received terror training while abroad. Could he have received some kind of bomb-training from Chechen militants who are experienced in making explosives? Also, might the brothers have done some kind of test runs of their explosive devices in the United States?
If the brothers’ motivation had something to do with their Chechen heritage, how might that have played out in this case?
Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, are NOT first generation Americans. Both were born in Russia, not in Chechnya, but of Chechnyan heritage.There are conflicting reports in regards to the birth places of the Tsarnaev brothers. Local police, cited in Kyrgyz media, suggest that both were born in Kyrgyzstan. But family members in the US said the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was born in Dagestan. The brothers are thought to have spent some of their youth in the city of Tomok, the centre of Kyrgyzstan’s Chechen community, which developed after Josef Stalin expelled hundreds of thousands of Chechens. For these new Americans, the politics of their homeland can sometimes become more meaningful and important than it was for their parents who fled the chaos of their native countries for the safety of the United States, and who now want to put those conflicts behind them. Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a legal U.S. permanent resident in 2007. The Tsarnaevs came with their family to the United States almost a decade ago from Kyrgyzstan, after living briefly in the Dagestan region of Russia. Tamerlan was 15 at the time, Dzhokhar was only 8 when he came to the US.
I will be surprised if the reason for bombing would have nothing in common with politics–say, personal revenge or indoctrination. Of course, immigrant’s youth, war trauma in the childhood, failed sports career are bad precursors. However, what I want to say, it all does not compute — bombings, GTA-style attack on the food store, security officer killed and explosives thrown into police squad from the hijacked car.. This is all too strange to be described in a few simple words like Islamism and terrorism.
Did the brothers intend to die during the attacks or their aftermath?
Several U.S. citizens and residents have intended to die in terrorist attacks. Dzhokar ran over his brother to get away from police. In effect not the massive police actions but their irrational actions after the bombing turned them in. The pattern of events after the bombing is highly suspect. A terrorist act, followed by a murder, followed by a carjacking and a 7/11 convenience store robbery? Very odd.
What does “Chechen nationalist” really mean?
It is important to remember that Chechen nationalist networks are not a unified front. There are numerous cells, some with incredibly different philosophies. Not entirely unlike the ideological divisions between Fatah, Black September and the PLO. Some Chechen groups are strictly nationalist groups (these groups are generally viewed in somewhat favorable light by the US intelligence community) others are localized Islamic cells that date back to the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth century. Over the years many of these cells have received direct funding, support or leadership from other Islamic cells in Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Last I heard these youths may have lived in Kazakhstan for some time which may have been the source of their (still ambiguous) connection to extreme Islamic philosophies.
Chechen terrorists who killed innocent Russian children in Beslan massacres were clinically celebrated by US – British media as “Freedom fighters”. All terrorists from Libya,Afghan,Syria came back to US like “afghan rebel” Bin Laden. Western governments support “rebels” & “rebels” already in everybody’s backyards, including Syria. The situation in Chechnya has always been portrayed as even more complicated
Were the brothers really “lone wolves” or patsies?
Given all the mayhem the two brothers are allegedly responsible for: Two bombings that caused three deaths and some two hundred injuries at the Boston Marathon as well as the subsequent murder of a policeman at MIT, did they have some kind of additional help?
According to Boston law enforcement officials, there is no evidence of such help and it’s worth recalling that Hasan was entirely a lone wolf who nonetheless managed to kill 13 on a U.S. military base with heavy security. However, the revelation that the two brothers suspected to be behind the Boston Marathon attack are ethnic Chechens has led the US establishment to perform a rapid volte-face towards the previously sympathetically viewed region and (anti-Russian) cause:
“Chechnya region is cauldron of Islamic militancy” proclaimed the headline in the New York Daily News. For LA Times, it was “Festering Chechen militancy”, while the Washington Times went with “Chechnya is a hotbed of Islamic extremism”.
USA Today, Fox News and the Washington Post all simply picked “Chechnya is a breeding ground for terrorism”, as their header.
The international experts now offered a different narrative of the conflict that has bedeviled Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and cost thousands of lives as well as draining billions of dollars from the budget.
“The [second Chechen conflict in 1999] war initially began as a nationalist war but very, very quickly metastasized into something that looks much more like the radical Salafi-Jihadi movements we’ve seen in other regions around the world,” Christopher Swift, a professor of National Security at Georgetown University, told ABC News.
“The movement that’s emerged from the 15 years of war is very radical, it’s very virulent, it’s very nasty”
“The Chechen jihadi network is very extensive,” Middle East analyst Walid Phares told Fox News. “They have a huge network inside Russia and Chechnya.”
“United States shut its eyes to Chechen terrorism,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
No longer were the Tsarnaev brothers victims of oppression, simply looking for a better life in America as refugees.
“They could well be supported by a significant international network,” John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told Fox News.
Evan Kohlmann, chairman of Flashpoint Global Partners, a New York-based international security consulting firm said, “these groups [the two men may have belonged to] can be just as radical as anything Al Qaeda puts out.”
Political Background
Most secessionist movements—whether in Russia, Mexico, Turkey or China—share a similar profile—a geographically isolated homeland, strong threats to a cultural and social identity, and grievances that stretch back generations. Chechnya is the archetypal example. Spread across the Caucasus, the Chechens have been subjugated by Russians for hundreds of years. During the 1940s, Stalin was particularly cruel to the Chechens, accusing them of betrayal in World War II and sending the entire population on a forced exile to Siberia, costing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Meanwhile, the practice of religion was outlawed in Chechnya, as it was in the rest of the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia lost a war to keep Chechnya under its thumb in the mid-1990s. Humiliated, a resurgent Moscow opted for a different approach—embarking on the second Chechen War under Putin which officially took place between 1999 and 2000 but unofficially went on many years after that. Instead of Russians fighting Chechens, Moscow would employ Chechens to fight Chechens, thereby converting a separatist war into a de facto civil conflict. This process, known as Chechenization, used khmad Kadyrov, then an insurgent leader, who joined the Russian side in 1999, bringing a large number of fighters with him. Kadyrov, like most Chechens, was Muslim, indeed so devout that he served as the local Mufti, or spiritual leader for some time. In May 2004 he was assassinated. Three years later, having reached the minimum age of 30, his son assumed the same role as Chechnya’s president and has continued to foster many aspects of Sharia law. Ramzan Kadyrov has overseen the building of one of Europe’s largest mosques and ordered women to be veiled in public buildings and schools. Authorities discourage the drinking of alcohol.
The current Mufti, Sultan Mirzayev, one of the republic’s most powerful men, justifies religious edicts as a stabilizing force. “ Sunni Islam came here 400 years ago and we need it to preserve our society,” he said in a recent interview. “Islam is everything for Chechens. After all those years we can finally celebrate our ways.”
On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Wahhabist guerrillas are trying to unseat the Chechen government for not going far enough. While the insurgency in the 1990s had a nationalist bent, fighters offering resistance today are waging more of a jihad.The Arab Jihad sent some of its most dreaded fighters such as Ibn al-Khattab to Chechenya to train and indoctrinate the Chechens. Many Chechen Jihadis have also fought in Iraq and Afghanistan an now in Syria are among the most fanatical supporters of the Arab Jihad from Asia. Many have received training abroad for what Moscow deems to be the biggest security threat in the federation.
Many newspapers recalled the hostage-taking incidents that ended in tragedy at the musical Nord Ost in Moscow in 2002, and a school in Beslan in 2004.
Indeed, the National Interest foreign policy magazine went as far as to declare that Vladimir Putin’s Chechnya policy “has been vindicated” and that “President Obama needs to call Putin ASAP.” For all about turns, these abrupt attempts to give more context to the Boston Marathon bombing and redefine Chechens as ‘dangerous enemies of Western civilization’ may not even be particularly relevant. While the Tsarnaev brothers appeared to have a very strong sense of ethnic identity, there is little so far to suggest that they were a cell in some shadowy terror group. In fact, the two had barely spent any of their lives in their homeland.
The root cause, source & sponsor of global terrorism has one and only one address, which Saudi Arabia, this fact has been deliberately neglected and covered up by western powers mainly US because money & commercial interest has more values than morality & human life for western powers, unfortunately it has been like this for centuries.
Ethnic background
The Chechens are not ethnic Russians. The Chechens are Asian Caucasians (same as Persians, Indians, Afghans, Pakis, Arabs) who live at the boundary of the Asian & European part of the Russian Federation. Chechenya was part of Asia & Asian Empires eg. Scythian, Parthian & Mongol for 1000s of years & only conquered by Russia 400 years ago. The Chechens migrated from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle-East (West Asia) to Chechenya 8,000 years ago as their language (related to Hurrian & Urartian not to Russian) & migratory studies shows. TIn Dagestan and Chechnya, there is a tradition of Sunni Sufism, which is represented by Naqshbandi and Shadhili schools.According to Reuters, Muslim minorities make up a seventh (14%) of Russia’s population. Muslims constitute the nationalities in the North Caucasus residing between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea: Adyghe, Balkars, Chechens, Circassians, Ingush, Kabardin, Karachay, and numerous Dagestani peoples with are over 5,000 registered religious Muslim organizations (divided into Sunni, Shia and Sufi groups). The first Muslims within current Russian territory converted after the Arab conquests in the 8th century. The first Muslim state in Russia was of the Tatars inherited the religion 922. from that state. The Ottoman Empire offered to harbour the Circassians that did not wish to accept the rule of a Christian monarch, and many emigrated to Anatolia, the heart of the Ottoman Empire and ended up in modern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and Kosovo. Under Communist rule, Islam, like other Russian religions, was oppressed and suppressed. The majority of Muslims in Russia today adhere to the Sunni branch of Islam.
Conclusion
There is more than meets the eye. But it seems to be a typical homebreed terrorism. As for the terrorist being “White right wingers”, an op-ed piece in one of the east coast newspapers claimed that this was the work of such; Seems that would help the overall cause of everything from gun control to immigration reform. Never let a disaster go to waste. In the Washington Post there was a nice piece explaining why Obama was cautious calling the Boston killings terrorism. To me its clear why. It had the facts already, it is yet another FBI failure, the background was again contrary to his cultural appeasement policy and the Russian origin contrary to his policy against Russia.
Facts, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, RT.com and Guardian