The Jihadist threat within - Understanding the Boston Marathon bombings

The revelation that the alleged perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings are Chechen brothers, Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, migrants of a few years to the United States, together with their families adds a new dimension to the nature of the bomb attack. Chechen nationals have been waging a war against the Russian Federation for many years following two wars in the mid 1990s and early 2000s.

In their long, violent struggle against the Kremlin, Chechen radicals have hit soft civilian targets many times. In 2010, two female suicide bombers from Dagestan detonated explosives in the Moscow metro, killing at least 40 people and injuring 100. A year later, another suicide bomber struck Moscow’s airport killing 37 and wounding 180. Other attacks include the infamous Breslan school seige in 2004, where 334 hostages died, most of them children. Intelligence company Stratfor summarises the Boston Marathon bombings thus:

“This case highlights our analysis that the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from grassroots operatives who live in the West rather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks. This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in severity but broadened in scope in recent years -- a trend we expect to continue.

There will always be plenty of soft targets in a free society, and it is incredibly easy to kill people, even for untainred operatives. In this case, the brothers conducted an attack that was within their capabilities rather than attempting something more grandiose that would require outside assistance -- and which could therefore have put them in jeopardy of running into a government informant as they sought help. It is thus important for citizens to practice good situational awareness and to serve as grassroots defenders against the grassroots threat”.

In this sense the West will always be a target. The real question is whether they were acting as a small independant team or were there other connections and associations to extremist groups.