[LINK] Two links on Chechen terrorism, the Boston Marathon bombings, and globalization

[rfmcdonald]

I may blog more later today about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen brothers suspected of having undertaken the Boston Marathon bombings earlier this week. For now, I'll just share two links which go towards explaining more of the background of the two brothers, embedded in the post-Soviet Chechen diasporas and online social networks with dubious membership.

First is James Brooke's Voice of America article "Chechen Brothers Suspected in Boston Bombings Grew up as Refugees".

Russian TV reported Friday that two ethnic Chechen brothers are suspects in terrorist bombings. But, for Russians, there was a new twist: the bombings were in Boston.

In recent years, ethnic Chechens were charged in bombings of the Moscow metro, a Moscow airport and a train from Moscow. But this time, Russian reporters fleshed out the biographies of two young Chechen men, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suspected of attacks in the United States.

In Dagestan, a traditionally Islamic republic bordering Chechnya, school principal Temirmagomed Davudov said the Tsarnaev family came to Dagestan in 2001 from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. During World War II, Stalin deported most of the population of Chechnya to Central Asia.

Davudov told reporters that the two brothers and their two sisters attended school for one year, in 2001, in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. Then, he said, the family emigrated - apparently first to Turkey, then to the United States.

[. . .]

Andrei Soldatov, a security expert in Moscow, said he was surprised that American security officials failed to pick up on the jihadist music and video clips posted on a public YouTube site maintained for the last year by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother.

Soldatov said of the Chechen singer whose clips Tsarnaev posted: "He is quite radical. His song are mostly about jihad. The second category is clips, or, you might say accounts, of operations carried out in Dagestan."

The second, Luke Harding's Guardian report, underlines the exceptional nature of what happened. Chechen terrorism hasn't happened outside of the former Soviet Union for the past decade, at least. The Chechen conflict has become plugged into global terrorist conflicts.

In their long, violent struggle against the Kremlin, Chechen radicals have hit soft targets before. In 2010, two female suicide bombers from Dagestan blew up the Moscow metro, killing at least 40 people and injuring 100. A year later, another suicide bomber struck Moscow's Domodedovo airport, killing 37 and wounding 180. Other murderous attacks include one on a Beslan school in 2004, where 334 hostages died, most of them children.

But the Boston Marathon bombing, which police suspect was perpetrated by two Chechen brothers, Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are something altogether new. It is so far unclear how significant is the trail that appears to lead from the simmering ongoing insurgency in the mountains of the North Caucasus to the boulevards and suburban houses of North America.

[. . .]

In recent years, however, the Kremlin and its regional proxies have been battling a different kind of enemy. This new generation of insurgents has an explicitly Islamist goal: seeking to create a radical pan-Caucasian emirate ruled by Islamic law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. The movement's leader, Doku Umarov, unveiled this ambitious vision in 2007. He vowed to "liberate" not only Russia's Muslim north Caucasus but a large chunk of European Russia.

Umarov also suggested that devout Muslims should think internationally.

His comments, later softened, said: "Today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Palestine our brothers are fighting. Everyone who attacks Muslims wherever they are, are our enemies, common enemies. Our enemy is not Russia only, but everyone who wages war against Islam and Muslims."

This call to global jihad may perhaps offer a motive for an attack inside the US. As perhaps were trips back to Caucasus by the two bombing suspects. The new generation of twentysomething rebels is also exploiting a powerful new weapon: the internet. The main Chechen rebel website, kavkazcenter.com, posts reports from the jihadist movement worldwide: from Syria, where Chechen diaspora fighters are battling government forces in Aleppo, from Pakistan, and from Turkey.