Boston bombing suspect kept low profile in Dagestan
MAKHACHKALA, Russia (Reuters) – If Tamerlan Tsarnaev was already plotting the Boston Marathon bombings when he stayed in this bustling Russian city at the heart of an Islamist insurgency last year, neighbors say he hid it well.
DAILY BLOODSHED
Dagestan is the focal point of the insurgency in the North Caucasus where militants wage almost daily violence to establish an Islamist state. Residents of the city of half a million are so used to the violence that they are surprised by what they see as the fuss over the Boston bombings.
“What’s there to say? We’re used to this. There are bomb blasts and rebels everywhere,” said Galia Sulemanan, 55, a housewife buying bread in Abdulayeva’s grocery store. “Young people do this for money.”
The Caucasian Knot website, which monitors the violence, says 124 people were killed and 75 wounded in the first three months of his year in predominantly Muslim Russian provinces that stretch almost from the Caspian to the Black Sea, and include Dagestan and Chechnya.
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“Such things (as in Boston) are always upsetting but you know this happens every day here. We’re surprised by the huge reaction,” said Magomed, a young man in a black leather jacket who declined to give his full name.
“Americans think they are some kind of ‘super people’, like their lives are more important than others’; They’re the world’s police. We have enough of our own problems to worry about it.”
Insurgents from the North Caucasus have carried out attacks outside the region – including on Moscow’s subway and at the main international airport of Domodedovo, where 37 people were killed in a bombing in January 2011 – but not on U.S. soil.
Many people in the region have long focused their ire on Moscow and Kremlin-backed local leaders, not on the United States, although there are clear signs of irritation in the region about some American attitudes.
“They blew up three people in the United States and people are up in arms. When they (Americans) kill 150, 200 people in Afghanistan, Iraq – why do they react differently?” asked Vagib Devletkhanov, 24, a soldier in the Russian army.
Chechnya was a focal point of the 9/11 Hijackers from Saudi Arabia
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Great comment and information, however the jihadists are international and so are Sauda Arabian influence and funding. Search for the terms Salafist and Wahhabism. The Arabian Afghan mujihadeen moved into Serbia, Kosovo and Chechnya. Multiple 9/11 hijackers fought and trained in Chechnya. In The Netherlands, the first nationals traveled to Chechnya to participate in the war for independence from Russia and later set up a local terror cell, the Hofstad Group. There were two Mosques in the Netherlands teaching fundamentalist Wahhabism funded by Saudi charities. One was in Eindhoven where Samir Azzouz followed the teachings. Today there are more than 100 Dutch nationals fighting under the black flag in Syria for the Sunni expansion under leadership of the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.
The FSB policy on the risk of terror acts by the Tsarnaevs has some similarity with the Mossad and 9/11, once the US is attacked, the American people will understand our need to be tough on the (Palestinian) terrorists. So the War on Terror openes a new chapter and the Obama administration will beg forgiveness for missing the warning signs.
I find your comparison of the FSB with Mossad incredibly insulting, and I’m not even a Russian national. Russia is a huge autonomous nation with a very long history that can manage very well on its own thank you, which is more than can be said for Israel (unless you think that the Hebrew Bible describes the early history of Israel, which today’s Zionists effectively do).
The continued existence of Russia does not depend on Russia being able to manipulate the U.S. government. The same cannot be said for Israel.
We have no idea at this point why the FSB warned the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. For all anyone knows, the FSB was just trying to do the United States a favor.
I’ll wait for the FSB protest letter. 😉
Judging by his tweets, he sounds like a fairly typical hip American dude. He really reminds me of the homegrown young jihadists in Four Lions, which I heartily recommend to everyone.
I may be wrong of course, but there is little doubt in my mind that the motivation of the Tsarnaev brothers was a general displeasure at the American War on Terror, which is a war on Muslims. The interesting thing about Dzhokhar is that he comes across to me as bicultural: he can look at American foreign policy from an Islamist point of view, and yet when he speaks, he does not strike an American as coming from an “alien culture”. Thus, if he has his day in a public court, it will be interesting to see what the response of the American public will be. (It’s possible of course that given his youth, his lawyer might get him not to use the trial as a platform for expressing political opinions.)
I don’t even want to imagine what the fallout would have been if the attackers had been Muslim Palestinians. The media would have brought the country to a state of frenzy close to that of the days following 9/11. Now that would have been good for Israel.
His time in Dagestan in 2012. And a bit more family history.
New developments:
Slain Boston Bomb Suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev Eyed in Jewish Triple Murder in Waltham, Mass. (2011)
See my new diary – Tsarnaev Eyed in Jewish Triple Murder in 2011.
Wonder if anyone has checked source documents to nail down when the hell Tam and his parents were in the US and Dagestan. This report says Tam arrived March 2012 — all others have been saying January – June. Instead of leaving the US some years ago, this report still has him in the US in March 2012.