Chechens: Legendary Tough Guys

At this point we still don’t know how much time Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two brothers suspected of committing the Boston Marathon bombing, spent in Chechnya. Dzhokhar, who emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 2002, when he was 9 years old, may have no memory of the place. But we do know that both brothers identified as Chechens: Tamerlan told a photographer his family had been driven from their homeland by “war” and that he wanted to wrestle for the Chechen Olympics team if the country ever won its independence from Russia. He put a Chechen dictionary and works of Chechen history on his Amazon wish list. Both brothers also described themselves as Muslims, and since the Chechen insurgency is overwhelmingly Islamist, it’s very possible they viewed the bombing as a blow struck on behalf of a Chechen jihad.