Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar came to this country 10 years ago as refugees from two wars of independence their countrymen fought, and ultimately lost, against the Russians after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
That background goes a long way to explaining Monday’s carnage at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and the unexploded ordnance littering the streets of Watertown, Mass., yesterday.
As veterans of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan know, Chechen fighters — fanatical Muslims from the Caucasus, often Russian-trained — are among the toughest fighters in the Islamist camp. Smarter, braver and tactically superior to the Arabs, they gave our troops the toughest opposition they faced.
They’re famous for their savagery. The Chechens were behind the horrific 2004 Beslan school massacre that resulted in the deaths of more than 380 people, many of them schoolchildren. Over the course of three agonizing days, they assaulted a defenseless Russian school, wired it with explosives and slaughtered as many kids as they could before the Russians finally crushed them.
A Chechen suicide squad was also behind the spectacular attack on Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater in the fall of 2002. There, some 40 or so separatists seized 850 hostages and held them for three days until Russian special forces pumped an incapacitating gas into the building and retook it. All the Chechens died, along with 130 hostages, many of them killed by the gas.
It’ll be some time, if ever, before we know whether the Tsarnaev brothers bring the struggle for Chechen independence to New England, or whether their animus against innocent Americans, most of whom have never heard of Chechnya and couldn’t care less, was a symptom of something larger.
They would hardly be the last resident-in-America Muslims, including many natives, to be seduced by radical dreams of jihad. Since 2001, some 104 criminal cases have involved domestic jihadism, including plots in Texas, North Carolina and more than a dozen in New York City.
Whether the Tsarnaev brothers are part of a larger plot remains to be seen. An unprecedented force of police and SWAT, including members of several federal agencies, was mobilized against them, which gives you an indication of how seriously the feds are taking this.
And there may be worse to come.
The brothers may have been just a couple of lone wolves — albeit extremely heavily armed lone wolves — or they may have been the first wave of a larger plot that was disrupted late Thursday night when the running shootout began.
Scenarios like that keep our counter-terrorism operatives awake at night — because, if they do turn out to be a cell of just two, there’s almost no way to protect ourselves against them.
All this will throw a big curve ball at the immigration-reform debate now underway in Washington. Shouldn’t we take into account both religion and country of origin when considering asylum requests and other forms of entry? It’s not discrimination to keep potential enemies out — especially ones so lacking in conscience that they find it easy to plant the bomb next to an 8-year-old boy.
In a bitter irony, one of the cars they reportedly hijacked bore a bumper sticker featuring a mixture of religious symbols, including the Star of David, the Cross and the Muslim crescent, and spelling out the word “Coexist.”
For some people, sadly, coexistence is a one-way street.