How Chechnya's Conflict Became a Global Concern

If anything is to be learned at this point, just days after the bombings at the Boston Marathon, it is that every terrorist attack should be approached as a discrete event, disaggregated from assumptions about groups, "hallmarks" and ethnicity. Just ask the young Saudi man injured by the explosion, whom some in the news media wrongly tagged as a suspect. We should take a careful, measured look at the inevitable talk of the suspected bombers' links to Chechnya.

The Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan, 26, and Dzhokar, 19, would have been babies in 1994 when their ethnic homeland, a Russian republic in North Caucasus region, was ripped apart by a war of independence. I was editing a newspaper in Russia at the time and visited Chechnya just before the war to talk to the republic's new president, a former Soviet air force general by the name of Dzhokar Dudayev. Dudayev was a strange character but not remotely Islamist. He liked to drink and fought with the Soviet military against the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Chechens are Muslims, but of the moderate Sufi rite. Islamic jihad played no role in their bid for independence.