The Tsarnaev brothers were ethnic Chechens whose family fled the breakaway republic in the remote Caucasus mountains where insurgents fought two bloody wars with Russia at the cost of more than 100,000 lives.
Even after the worst of the fighting was over, Chechnya became a training ground for terrorists who have carried out attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the FBI’s “Suspect Number 2” in Monday’s bombing, followed two Internet sites that advocated independence for Chechnya, whose heavily Muslim population of more than 1 million suffered badly during Soviet rule.
On a Facebook-like site, Tsarnaev, 19, posted a bitter joke about how Chechens are treated. “A car goes by with a Chechen, a man from Dagestan and one from Ingushtia. Question: Who is driving?” The answer is “The police.”
His uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said the family bounced around the region including neighboring Dagestan before coming to America. Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, never lived in Chechnya, he said.
But, he added, “we’re Chechens. We’re ethnic Chechens.”
No, you’re not, said Chechnya’s president, Ramazan Kadyrov.
“They grew up in the USA. Their viewpoints and beliefs were formed there,” he said. “You must look for the roots of evil in America.”
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There was no indication that the brothers were tied to Chechen terror groups who carried out a string of ghastly attacks in the last decade, including one at a Moscow subway station in 2010 when two women suicide bombers killed 39 people.
Chechen rebels were also blamed for the September 2004 seizure of more than 1,000 people, including nearly 800 children, in a school in Beslan, in a nearby Russian republic. Russian “black beret” special forces retook the school and killed 32 terrorists but nearly 300 civilians also died.
Many Chechens hated Russia because during World War II Josef Stalin brutally uprooted nearly 400,000 of them because he feared they sympathized with the Nazis.
But why the brothers would attack America is unknown.
On a Twitter account believed to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s he wrote last April, “How I loved my homeland #Dagestan # Chechnya.”
Ruslan Tsarni said the Boston Marathon bombing had “nothing to do” with his homeland. “Chechens are a peaceful people,” he said.