The Caucasus Connection
At a radical mosque in Dagestan, alleged marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev is remembered by many worshippers—and the secret police. By Anna Nemtsova
The mosque on Kotrova Street in the capital of Dagestan is abuzz with passionate discussions. Here in the northern Caucasus, Muslim revolutionaries are fighting to break away from Russia and create a Salafi “emirate” akin to the caliphate yearned for by Al Qaeda. So people are used to talk about “terrorism.” But they are not used to hearing it linked to words like “Boston” and “marathon.” And they are trying to square what they’re hearing now with their memories of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the elder of the two brothers at the center of the atrocity in the United States, who was killed last Friday in a Boston suburb.
The men at the mosque on Kotrova Street saw a lot of Tsarnaev last summer and so, it appears, did the local security forces. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, allegedly even had a case file on him, according to one well-placed security source. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dossier 1713. He was allegedly in the constant company of another Salafist, later killed, whom the FSB believed to have ties to the rebels in Caucasus. The Russian and Dagestani cops were allegedly “watching him closely for five months and three weeks,” according to this source. (The Russians had asked the FBI to take a close look at Tsarnaev in 2011, but the FBI had found nothing on him that they thought worth pursuing.)
“We remember him well,” says Shamil, a young Salafist at the mosque. “He impressed us, as he was from America.” The Tsarnaev family hailed from Chechnya, in fact, but the boys, Tamerlan and 19-year-old Dzokhar, had never lived there, and they essentially grew up in the United States these past 10 years.
Tamerlan, a boxer who found it increasingly hard to fit in as an American, may well have been searching for his roots in the Caucasus. But in that process, he was discovering and hardening his ties to radical Islamists.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/22/the-caucasus-connection.html