Chechens

This had to be the ultimate in reality television. The whole world watched as Watertown, and then Boston itself, was locked down while 9,000 officers hunted the second of a pair of suspects for the marathon bombing.

The suspects were identified from an intense review of thousands of video clips of the area around the finish line. This was crowd-sourcing at its best: thousands of citizens contributed photos they took of the area. In the end, the authorities managed to identify the most likely perpetrators.

If there is such a thing as public diplomacy, this will have to be called public police work. Investigators relied on massive inputs of information from the public — and then relied on public cooperation to finally corner the fugitives. 

Friday night, the FBI released photos of the suspects. Hours after that, the frantic suspects held up a convenience store, apparently to grab money for their escape. Then everything just went terribly wrong: they shot dead a security officer, carjacked a vehicle (to whose owner they confirmed they were the bombers), got into a firefight with policemen where the elder of the two was killed.

It took about 20 hours after the first firefight to corner the younger of the two. Quite typical of this whole process, the suspect was found by an ordinary citizen stepping out to inspect his boat after alert levels were lowered in his neighborhood.

The capture of the second suspect ended a reign of terror that descended on Boston and its placid suburbs.

The two men responsible for the terror are unlikely terrorists. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in the first firefight, is only 26. His kid brother Dzokhar is only 19.

Although their parents remain in the Russian region of Dagestan, many of their relatives immigrated to the US and Canada. Tamerlan received American citizenship recently. The brothers are students in a city known for its fine schools.

The Tsarnaev family are Chechens, although they did not have real roots in Chechnya. The brothers were born in Kazakhstan and stayed in Dagestan only five months on their way to the US.

Their family history is not unusual for Chechens, a people thrown into a diaspora. Chechnya, in the 19th century, was among the last territories annexed to the Russian empire. In 1944, the dictator Josef Stalin decided the Chechens were a disloyal and undesirable people. He had Chechnya depopulated, with hundreds of thousands thrown up the Caucasus steppes. A fourth of the population died in the process.

In the early nineties, as the Soviet Asian republics such as Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan seceded from a crumbling Soviet Union, the Chechens demanded their independence. In 1994, they rose in revolt. Moscow responded with absolute brutality. Grozny, capital of Chechnya, was reduced to rubble.

Since then, Chechen rebels have been waging a war of terror against Russia. They once held hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater. Chechnya, over the past two decades, became a hotbed for Islamic fundamentalists. A brutal war of attrition carried on through this period.

Today, Chechen rebels affiliated with Al Qaeda groups are said to be fighting in Syria against the al-Assad regime. The US is supporting the rebel coalition in Syria, although extremely wary of the radical militants.

The Tsarnaev clan members in the US and Canada are obviously fleeing the violence in their homeland, hoping to secure a future of peace for their children. But the virus of a turbulent history, apparently, could not be expelled.

In 2006, Tamerlan (named after a historic warrior) visited his homeland and apparently caught the virus of radicalism. He became a more devout Muslim when he returned to the US. His younger brother, Dzhokhar, by most accounts, was a carefree teenager typical of his peers in a bustling American city. The younger Tsarnaev was most likely dragged into this self-styled jihad by his brother.

All acts of terror are, by definition, irrational. There is little sense in trying to figure out the reasons certain things are done. It is still important, however, to interrogate the seriously injured Dzhokhar if only to find out whether the brothers operated by themselves or are part of a larger conspiracy.

This is not the first time US citizens, immigrants from other cultures, rediscovered their historic identities and embraced the most radical fringes of that rediscovered self. The Tsarnaev brothers are not the first young Americans to turn to Islamic fundamentalism and participate in terrorist networks.

There is a complex sociology here yet to be fully understood. In this age of mass migration, subcultures nurtured by the new media and globalized information, political tensions and ideological battles elsewhere could feasibly be imported and tragically expressed in an unsuspecting milieu such as the Boston marathon.

Open societies are, in a way, vulnerable to the scourge of terrorists of every stripe, the epidemic of this new century. The antidote, however, is not to close down freedoms but to strengthen communities.

The people of Boston taught us well about how communities should respond to threats from within. As soon as the bombs went off, Bostonians pulled together not only to save the victims and mourn the dead but, more importantly, to smoke out the perpetrators.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, severely wounded at the throat, has much to tell us, not by what he might say but how he and his brother, refugees from a region time forgot, mutated into purveyors of horror in a society that embraced them as immigrants and asked them no questions about their traumatized homeland.