Caucasus Archive

When authorities revealed the identity of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, the news that the two men, Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, were of Chechen origin might have put a smile of satisfaction on Vladimir Putin’s face. After all, the Russian president might have concluded, a terrorist attack by Chechens in America would go some way in vindicating his hard-line approach to Chechen rebels. The fact, however, is that the evidence so far does not support that view. Judging by what we know at this point, while the Tsarnaev brothers came from a Chechen family, their ideology had little […]

The significance of the ethnicity of the two Boston Marathon bombers is still unclear, as are the reasons for the Tsarnaev brothers’ transformation into Islamist terrorists, but the latest evidence seems to suggest that the elder brother’s trip last year to the North Caucasus played a key role. Many of the family’s friends and relatives still live in the North Caucasus, which includes the republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia. The region has been a hotbed of radicalism and militarism for at least a century. The North Caucasus became radicalized after Czarist Russia conquered the previously independent Muslim peoplesin the […]

Georgia’s recent announcement of its intention to contribute to the European Union military training mission in Mali signals not only Tbilisi’s continued role as a reliable supplier of forces for Euro-Atlantic security missions, but also the Georgian military’s ambitions as a niche counterterrorism force. Under the new Georgian Dream coalition government, the Defense Ministry is embarking on a series of reforms to fit its force structure to this mission set. After the surprise victory of Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition in Georgia’s October 2012 parliamentary elections, the new government was quick to reaffirm the country’s Western orientation. This included carrying […]