A Preliminary Profile of the Boston Bombers: The Tsarnaev Brothers

The Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan, 26 years old, and 19-year-old Jokhar, have been accused of carrying out the bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15. Tamerlan has died from injuries sustained from a shootout with police on Friday, April 19. While, as of the publication of this article, the younger brother, Jokhar, is still at large.

The Tsarnaev family used to reside in Kyrgyzstan. They probably ended up in Kyrgyzstan after mass deportation of Chechens from the North Caucasus in 1944. Today, there are approximately 20,000 ethnic Chechens still residing in Kyrgyzstan. Shortly before the onset of the second Russian-Chechen war in September 1999, the Tsarnaev family moved to their homeland in Chechnya. After the war began in 1999, they moved to Dagestan, having apparently become refugees. The fact that they resided in Makhachkala and not in Khasavyurt, as most other ethnic Chechens in the republic, indicates that they had the financial means to live in the capital of Dagestan, which is quite expensive. They also had relatives in the city and were able to send their children to one of the best schools in Makhachkala, School #1. The younger brother, Jokhar Tsarnaev, went to this school only for one year where he completed the first grade (http://www.zman.com/news/2013/04/19/149396.html).

Subsequently, the family was divided as the father, Anzor, stayed in Makhachkala, while the rest of the family started looking for ways to emigrate from the North Caucasus. His mother, Zubeidat, had four children: two sons and two daughters, who managed to emigrate legally to the United States. Once in the US, she received permanent residence for herself and her children. The mother’s first name, Zubeidat, suggests she was of Dagestani origin and that is probably why the family moved to Dagestan in the first place.

Having settled in the Boston area, the Tsarnaevs tried to adapt to their new home. The elder brother, Tamerlan, received a degree in engineering and was a boxer, who reportedly dreamed of competing in sporting events under the US flag. Tamerlan received US resident status in 2007 (http://lenta.ru/news/2013/04/19/anzor/).

The second brother, 19-year-old Jokhar, had only just begun to attend college. On his Internet page of the online social network VK.com, he described his views and also listed several groups of which he was a member. Jokhar was a member of three Muslim groups, but none of the groups could be described as terrorist or jihadist; they rather provided information about Islam. One of the groups, for instance, Salamword collected funds for people suffering with cancer. The second group, Islam.Muslims.Islam, simply spread photographs of mosques from around the world. The third group, called Lya ‘iLyaha’iLla-Pust Zvuchit V Nashikh Serdtsakh, does nothing besides quoting Muslim hadiths.

In light of preliminary information about the Tsarnaevs, there is not appear to be much, if any, indication that Jokhar had any connection to jihadist groups or sympathized with the most well-known terrorist organization in the North Caucasus called the Caucasus Emirate, or any other similar groups. On the contrary, in one of his blog entries, he laments having no American friends, having lived in the country for so long. All of his friends were from the former Soviet Union.

Another surprising piece of evidence suggests that Jokhar had accessed his webpage at 3 o’clock Boston time, but did not leave any comments. It was unclear whether it was AM or PM time (http://vk.com/id160300242?z=tag160300242). The bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line were detonated at approximately 2:50 PM, local time.

The father of the two brothers from Makhachkala reckons that his children were framed and that his son Jokhar was like an angel (http://lenta.ru/news/2013/04/19/anzor/). Friends of the brothers describe them as ordinary American guys.

In any case, the Boston police already have made a mistake in their preliminary analysis of the brothers, stating that the suspects may have received martial skills, including the ability to make Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Chechnya. They were not present in Chechnya, either during the first war (1994-1995) or during the second war in Chechnya that started in September 1999. The brothers would not have been able to receive any type of fighting or military experience because of their age. Their family emigrated to the US when the eldest brother was only 16. Taking into account that before their move to the US they had lived in Russia for two years and prior to that they had resided for one year in Dagestan, it is hard to see their connection to militants operating in Chechnya or elsewhere in the North Caucasus.

Overheard on the interwebs:

Chechnya is the ne plus ultra exemplar of the mountain bandit culture. Like the Bomb Brothers, Chechens tend to be brave, aggressive, macho, uncooperative, thieving (the Bomb Mom is wanted for shoplifting), and vicious.

All over the world, it's common for people who live in highly defensible positions, such as mountains, to raid their neighbors, then beat it back to their geographically complex and daunting home turf. As Thomas Babington Macaulay pointed out, his Scottish Highlander ancestors were "Gaelic marauders" preying upon the lowland Scots and the northern English until they overreached and invaded central England in 1745 under Bonnie Prince Charlie. After that, the furious English finally crushed the Highlands' mountain bandit culture.

Other mountain bandit cultures include the Pathans of the mountains dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Pathan culture is remarkably dysfunctional, while the Chechen culture, while constantly infuriating to their neighbors, makes for competent, cohesive raiding parties. Thus, Chechen guerrillas repeatedly humiliated Russia in the 1990s. Much of Putin's prestige among Russians owes to his finally paying back in 1999 the insults Russia endured at the hands of this tiny breakaway nationality of less than two million people.

I feel sorry for the Chechens that, due to a Leninist technicality, they didn't get their own country when the Soviet Union broke up, while the Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and Armenians on the south side of Caucasus Mountains got independence. But, I also understand why the lowlanders, as in Britain after 1745, periodically get fed up with the highlanders' predation.

But, mostly, I don't want Chechens' problems in my country, and thus I don't want them in my country.

Back to the NYT oped: what's a more accurate word to link to Chechens:

“refugee.” Perhaps 20 percent, perhaps more, of all Chechens have left Chechnya in the last 20 years.

Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston bombings, was born to a Chechen family. He was just a baby when Boris N. Yeltsin sent tanks to subdue his rebellious nation. At this point, we know very little about the suspect’s motivations. It’s unclear how much time, if any, he’d spent in Chechnya,

None. He lived in Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan before coming to the United States. The U.S. is a lot nicer place to live than Kyrgyzstan or Dagestan (in Russia, next door to Chechnya) but they weren't usually war zones, except when Chechen raiding parties kidnapped Dagestanis. Their parents recently moved back to Dagestan, probably to escape the Bomb Mom's criminal charges here, so it can't be so awful.

while he spent years living in the United States. All we know is that, for his generation, Chechnya has always been a place of violence, abductions, widows, orphans and rape: a place to escape from, not to go home to.

Dzhokhar, with his boy band sensitive looks, might have been able to get off with, say, a 10-year-sentence if he'd given up peacefully and blamed it all on his thuggish big brother. A jury with a lot of women on it might have melted for a well-coached Oprah-ready story. But, no true Chechen would do something so womanly and dishonorable, so Dzhokhar blasted away when he was finally located.

... In 2008, I spent a month traveling through Europe’s Chechen diaspora, trying to understand how the people had been affected by what they had survived. I met Birlant and her husband, Musa, in the town of Terespol, the entry point for Chechens coming to claim asylum in Poland. Birlant’s father and brother had been shot in front of her. Now she lived in a bleak hostel in a pine forest, along with 48 other Chechen families, and hated it there; they wanted to go to Austria.

“If you cannot treat people like people, then why won’t they let us go to a country that will?” asked Musa.

It was a sentiment I often heard. Wherever they were, they wanted to go somewhere else, do something else, be someone else. Could I take them to London? Perhaps life was better where I lived. Musa called me for years after that one brief meeting, from Helsinki, from Stockholm, from Oslo, never sounding any happier. ...

But there was enough in America already to alienate young men like Adam Lanza, Dylan Klebold and all the other mass murderers in recent history. There are enough weapons to kill anyone you want, and a madman can always find an excuse for murder if he looks for one.

There are only about 200 Chechens in the United States, so 1% of all Chechens here have turned out to be spectacular terrorists.

On the quaint Chechen custom of bride napping:

One of my older relatives used to be a doctor in Chechnya. Soviet Union provided young grads with first jobs they weren’t allowed to refuse, and this great uncle of mine thinks his assignment had something to do with being a son of a convicted “capitalist” who ended his days in a work camp. Anyway...

From him I learned that one of the things that Chechens liked to steal from their neighbors was girls. That’s how the majority of Chechens gets married. Some of them are even blond because of this. In fact, it became so normal, that this is how the majority of Chechen girls got married too. I must stress that being kidnapped is not a symbolic marriage ritual in that culture. The girl and her family really don’t know who’s gonna grab her and when. The families even take some lethargic steps to attempt to prevent this.

It’s important to note that, according to Chechen culture, real men don’t kidnap their brides on foot. They must be riding something , and they must be riding it fast. I’ve actually seen videos of the Chechen boys practicing grabbing various objects while riding a motorcycle or on horseback.

They got pretty good at grabbing things while riding fast, but were they always successful? No. No, they weren’t. That’s when my relative came in. He got to meet a lot of failed attempts at bride kidnapping at his little hospital at Chechnya. I asked him if those girls ever got married after that. He told me that it generally depended on how badly they got mangled during the first attempt.

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