Did the Boston Bombing Suspects' Father Work for Kadyrov as an "Enforcer"?

English-language subtitles version. Original Russian lets you know that his sentence about "whether you work in the police" sounds very hypothetical and not necessarily about him. You also see more of the interior of his room on Russian version.

There are two things that have perplexed me about all the news stories, tweets and rumours swirling around the case of the two Chechen suspects in the Boston bombing. (To join the web industry of mining all his tweets, use this Excel sheet. I read all the Russian ones in particular and found nothing very intriguing except his command to "pizdu zakroi" to one man for some reason who doesn't seem to hook up to anything jihad).

I was operating at first regarding this bombing on the supposition that either Occupy Boston or Anonymous vigilantes mad at the Aaron Swartz case at MIT were involved in it, going to the next level after months -- years -- of harassment and hacking and even some real-life stalking of prosecutors in the Swartz case. That theory didn't pan out and was merely a supposition born of my own speculation. Even so, I continue to think these radical movements are infiltrated by various powers in the world, and it's possible -- and I began thinking actively about it precisely because on the eve of the bombing, a leading former (they never really are) Anonymous figure with a high following on Twitter linked to two articles about how Anonymous is infiltrated by Al Qaeda.

I didn't think that the suspects might come from the other half of my interests and professional life -- Russia. I happened to have worked intensively on the issues of human rights related to both Chechen wars in the 1990s and early 2000s. I coudn't possibly begin to describe all this now, but here's one story that sums it up for me. I used to have a colleague who worked in our office as an intern for a time and was also in the Memorial movement (Russia's leading human rights group). She was Ingush but had been in Chechnya and was a war widow. I got to talking with her one day as we struggled to put together a report about the sudden massive displacement of Chechens into Ingushetia and the pleas for help to the West from then-president Aushev (who I see is returning to the scene again). We had lengthy faxes from his office with all the horrible news, babies being born in ditches, crowds pushing up against barbed wire, no milk for children, etc. Aushev made the brave decision to let in the entire crowds of IDPs and house them in train cars and home-stays. Fortunately we were able to get this into the hands of Sergio de Mello, at that time head of humanitarian affairs at the UN. In any event, I cautiously talked to her about the radicalization of the Chechen resistance toward Islam which was already becoming more visible in 1997-1998 by contrast with 1994-1996. I delicately posed that question so as not to injure any sensibilities, saying helpfully, "Perhaps this is about ancient traditions and about culture?"

She flatly objected to the idea that the brand of Islam that was now causing some men to kick women out of the marketplace if they didn't have headscarves on to be "culture".

"It is not culture," she told me soberly. "It is absence of culture."

Precisely.

Now to the two perplexing things.

1. Why were the Tsarnaev brothers at MIT? And at MIT with guns and bombs? Some people erroneously say they merely held up a 7/11 near MIT. But that's not the case. First they went to MIT, then they got the getaway car from the guy in the 7/11 parking lot. They shot and killed an MIT policeman and set off bombs there. Why? Were they protesting Aaron Swartz's case, too, or making it look like they were, or did they know security there wasn't as tight as elsewhere (as we're constantly told about his case!!!) or *what*?! This question is asked by journalists at press conferences with police and FBI on TV; they don't. WHY DID THEY GO TO MIT? It was not their university.

[Update: Police have suggested that they needed a second gun, and wresting it from a policeman by assassinating him seemed to be the best way to get it as they were in the heat of escape after they felt they were identified. But it's a very expensive way to get a gun that led to Tamerlan's death in a shoot-out. Really, there was no other way to get weapons for someone who knew how to build a bomb? If he already had one gun, especially. I still think we have to keep asking if they were waiting for an accomplice to bring them money or guns in or around the MIT area.]

2. Is their father Anzor Tsarnaev a prosecutor or policeman or somehow involved in law-enforcement; if so, on whose side, working for whom, and is he working for Kadyrov?

I had to look quite a while for this supposed "prosecutor" business, and I found it was in wire stories referencing interviews with the relatives which just weren't clear. The father's interview with RT (the only existing interview it seems) is vague, as he makes only references in an abstract way, "Even if you work for ugolovka (criminal investigation) or the MVD (Interior Ministry)" you can be discriminated against as a Chechen.

Links to various articles with these claims including at the Kavkaz Center are in my Twitter feed and I will add later.

But we do not have any definitive confirmation that the father worked in the prosecutor's office or MVD; we do not know he is currently employed; we don't know that he ever worked for Kadyrov. All we can see on the unreliable pro-Chechen resistance site Kavkaz Center is that he is allegedly "a supporter" and we know from the aunt's interview that he was "an enforcer" which I think is merely just bad English for "law-enforcer" as I explain in my comment below.

Enter Juan Cole, with literary fantasy and an anti-American tale that fits the sensibilities of all the lefties and "progressives" who want to look for anything but Islamic terror in this story for their own reasons:

The key back in 2013, I think, is Maret Tsarnaeva’s assertion that the father, Anzor, ‘worked in the enforcement agencies’ in Russian Chechnya. ‘We were,’ she said, ‘lucky to get him out of Kyrgyzstan alive,’ presumably because radical Muslims were trying to track him down and take revenge on him there. She also seems to imply that he was given asylum in the US easily, precisely because he had been an ‘enforcer’ in Grozny against the Muslim fundamentalist rebels, and so there was no doubt that his life was in danger from them.

So you have young men from a secular, ex-Soviet Muslim family that had perhaps fought the Chechen fundamentalists. And you have young men who felt they had failed their father.

I find this a rather contrived version of a possible successful asylum case for a Chechen in the US, having worked directly on such cases. It would be enough to say you were non-combatants from Chechnya facing discrimination anywhere in the former USSR. The US government takes the Kremlin's side on Chechnya and has never embraced the idea of independence or certainly not armed combat. But it quietly takes up the human rights issues in more low profile ways and wouldn't see that it had to help Putin crush Chechens as people. In other words, they distinguish between their support for Putin's counter-terror operations yet express concerns about the human rights consequences.

It's very possible that the elder brother Tamerlan was recruited into a cult-like group and indoctrinated in violent jihad and either did a freelance job to move up the ranks or performed orders for some other figure -- and his own uncle implies this. But his uncle said he was recruited by an "Armenian" and that just makes no sense. Huh? Armenians are Christians. They rarely convert to Islam. There are Armenians in this community where the brothers live, but the link to them isn't established and so far nobody has come up with any connections to explain that vague remark of the father's. An Armenian born in the US of course could take up any religion, just as a someone with a heritage as a Catholic or Jew might, but it is exotic and so it needs verification. The one connection that was about three bridges too far has been eliminated as incorrect and deleted on some journalists' feeds. So we await more on that.

Here is my answer on Juan Cole's blog while I am in the moderation queue of this Internet freedom fighter:

Bazarov was a Russian -- these two brothers are Chechens. In some ways, you can say all nihilists come out from under Bazar's overcoat, but the Chechens had their own path and it is different than Russia's of course. If you're going to read from literature, at least use Lermontov's Hero of Our Time or Tolstoy's Hadji Murat rather than stories from Moscow.

When the aunt says "enforcement"  I think she merely means "law-enforcement," or "pravokhranitelnyye organy" without some kind of coloration to it. Not "enforcer" in the sense of sent like secret police or the mob. You imply with your deployment of the term that the father was some kind of thug in the pay of Kadyrov bent on keeping the diaspora in line in Kyrgyzstan -- but he doesn't seem to look the part.

A man who has to greet an RT crew coming to interview them in a room where he's sitting on his bed in modest clothing without fancy wrist watches isn't somebody who has a privileged enough position to be what is claimed about him -- it doesn't track. Of course, we can't know everything and maybe he is.

During the RT interview, he makes an indirect reference to the fact that "even if you work in criminal investigation (ugolovka) or the MVD (interior ministry)" you can face discrimination as a Chechen in Kyrgyzstan. He delicately refers to the "nuances" when trying to get the Russian camera crew to understand what Chechens went through. His reference to those agencies sounds neutral. Maybe he had a job in one of them but it doesn't sound as if he still has it.

You'd have to build a better case for making him out to be a direct agent of Kadyrov, give that he was in Kyrgyzstan, having fled there after the 2nd Chechen war, then he went to the US, then came back -- and spent a year in Chechnya at some point but also left it again to go to Kyrgyzstan -- and then to Dagestan.

That's quite a trail for somebody who is supposedly in with Kadyrov. Now, he does say to Kavkaz Center that he's a "supporter" of Kadyrov, but we just don't know the particulars. We need to learn the exact titles, agencies, years of work, and places of work of these people.

I continue to maintain that we should look at sports clubs, not prosecutor's offices and Islamic groups. That's where the KGB and its successors have always controlled young men, and the insignia on Dzhokhar's Twitter is Anzhi Makhachkala, the main Dagestani football club, owned by a billionaire close to the president of Dagestan -- a supporter of Putin. Sports clubs are how you move money and goods and people around outside the law in Russia; it is also how people are recruited to intelligence/siloviki (power ministry) work. The older son was a boxer; Putin himself is a sambo champion (a version of judo popular in the Soviet Union).

If this family were made up of officials, even not very high-ranking, why don't they show up in Russian-language searches of Google and other search engines? They didn't attend meetings, speak to the press, win medals? That's odd for them to have no footprint. Could this be a very old story of 20 years ago in the Soviet era? Both father and uncle do seem very well educated; the mother says she is a trained lawyer (jurist, which is not trial attorney but solicitor).

There are several possibilities regarding the sons, who were separated from their father, although we know from Dzhokhar's Twitter feed that he missed his father and quoted him (another clue that the "rebellion" theory may be all wet). They could be "rebelling" against their father, but given the tight relationships between parents and children and more respect for elders in that society, even with the dislocations of emigration, they might have been working for their father or some other relative or person related to Kadyrov IF he is an "agent of Kadyrov".

But maybe they are recruits to a shadowy organization that hooks up somewhere else.

My own hunch about this story is that it is not about Islam, and not about known Islamist terror groups, but about the state terrorism of Kadyrov, sanctioned by Putin [which is in opposition to Chechen rebels], and is in retaliation for the Magnitsky List, the list under the Magnitsky Act just released by the US Senate and confirmed by the Administration about visa sanctions and asset seizures for figures charged with human rights abuses in Russia.

Kadyrov is said to be on the classified portion of this list.

So it's different than your notion of the boys rebelling against their father in some personal drama from Russian literature not really related to extremist religion -- which I fear you have contrived from an anti-American tilt as a prospect that would remove from the view the usual target of the US operations against terror. I'm not for doing this.

When Putin or Kadyrov use Chechens or any terrorist groups as cat's paws, they're the problem, but then, so are those groups.

***

As I said from the first moment I heard of these two suspects, Putin is widely believed to use "otmorozhki", hired killers who have no emotions (otmorozhennye means "frozen"; sometimes they are called zombies). The image of the Chechen otmorozhka in the Russian tabloid media is big, and often it is the otmorozhki who are fingered for various crimes, i.e. the murder of journalists. I first heard the term in the 1990s in Belarus regarding not Chechens, but Russians and Belarusians who were veterans of the Chechen wars. It is now used about both Russians and Chechens.

Regarding the father: I could add that a man who seems alternately scared and angry and cuts off the interview right when he catches himself speculating who could have set up his sons doesn't fit the part of a cold-blooded Kadyrov enforcer, either. And even an enforcer, former enforcer or just plain police employee could be scared of him. My guess he is a lower-level policeman of the Soviet type in the organs, and pre-Kadyrov and not involved in the resistance but not a henchman, either. Maybe he served unwittingly in this plot, or maybe it's his connection. Just a guess. Even so, he *could* be involved -- with his sons -- in serving as cat's paws for Kadyrov in revenge for the Magnitsky list -- knowingly, or unknowingly.

I think any or all of these pieces of the puzzle could change in the coming week but I stand by the right to be wrong, to mount any or all hypotheses and not be driven by any political correctness.

 

Comments

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

A new piece of information from an AP interview with the father just published in the Washington Post. At least, I haven't seen it before:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/parents-of-boston-suspect-say-he-traveled-to-russia-to-visit-relatives-sleep-a-lot/2013/04/21/f4ac166c-aac5-11e2-9493-2ff3bf26c4b4_story.html

“He went with me twice, to see my uncles and aunts. I have lots of them,” the father said.

He said they also visited one of his daughters, who lives in the Chechen town of Urus-Martan with her husband. His son-in-law’s brothers all work in the police force under Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, he said.

***

So we have no confirmation of his own job in any law-enforcement, only that his daughter's husband's brothers are. While that may seem like a remote connection, in-laws are much more important relatives in this part of the world. Each individual in-law can have a special, separate term, i.e. brother of daughter's husband, in some regional languages.

[John McGrath]

Why were they in Cambridge? First of all they would be familiar with it because they lived in Cambridge and MIT is in Cambridge. Cambridge is a small city, the street they lived on is very near MIT. MIT, like the Marathon, would be a great symbolic target to go after. In addition, the younger boy, for small fees, was in the habit of bringing MIT students to an auto repaid service in their Cambridge neighborhood. It is quite likely that he became jealous of the privileged MIT students. I lived in that neighborhood and many of the working class kids resented the MIT students. In addition, some MIT professors work on weapons. So why not? Do not attribute great planning to these two losers.

If you want a conspiracy, listen to the Chechyan/Caucasus rebels against Russia. The CIA has been interference to support these rebels. What better way to get the CIA out of the picture than to recruit two mixed up American Chechnyans to commit a terrorist act that would horrify the American people and cause sympathy for Russia in its attempt to control those fanatical Muslims. Especially if Russia attempted to "help" the US intelligence services by warning them about the older brother. If they were so concerned about him, why didn't they take him into custody went he went back to the Caucasus?

Finally, the mysterious Misha who talked the older brother into radicalized Islam and may have suggested taking action against America for waging war on Islam. This red bearded alleged Armenian convert from Christianity to Islam has diapered and no one knows anything about him. He sounds like a Russian operative deliberately radicalizing the Chechnyan boys to do something that would stir up American hatred against Chechnyans.

T

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