by Gordon M. Hahn
More evidence emerged during his brother’s trial that Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev went to Dagestan in order to join the Caucasus Emirate (CE) mujahedin. After he returned to the U.S., Tamerlan was still telling his Chechen-American friends that he was planning to join the CE. A defense witness in the case of Tamerlan’s younger brother and co-conspirator Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Magomed Dolokov, a physicist from the Russian Caucasus who planned to attend a master’s program at MIT, was interviewed multiple times by the FBI after the bombings but has since vanished. Dolokov told the FBI that he met Tamerlan at the Prospect Street mosque in Cambridge in July 2012 and was with both brothers three days before the Boston blasts. Dolokov told the FBI he met with Tamerlan at the latter’s Cambridge home in August 2012, and, according to an FBI report, “Tamerlan told Dolokov he was going to join the mujahedeen,” in Dagestan (http://6abc.com/news/russians-to-testify-in-boston-bombing-trial-under-hotel-arrest/691303/). I have documented further evidence of this elsewhere and warned about North Caucasians radicalized by the CE posed a threat to the West.
In this connection, one of my favorite media experiences. Listen closely to my two interlocutors – one from Al-Jazeera and a professor from leftist American academia. Their politically correct delusions demonstrate precisely why our country can’t get anything right anymore. They are insistent that the attack had nothing to do with the Islamism, Chechenya and the North Caucasus. See the 19 April 2013 video “The Politics of Chechnya” from The Huffington Post Live at http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/explaining-chechyna-as-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-manhunt-continues/516dd0b62b8c2a55870001ba
As I noted then and later demonstrated, the attack was inspired by the Caucasus Emirate mujahedin and the global jihadi revolutionary alliance of which it is a part. See, for example, my report “The Caucasus Emirate Comes to America: The Boston Marathon Attack” at http://gordonhahn.com/2013/09/11/the-caucasus-emirate-comes-to-america-the-boston-marathon-bombing/
For more on academic, journalistic, and think tank perfidy on the Caucasus mujahedin, see my report “The Caucasus Mujahedin Through Western Eyes, at http://gordonhahn.com/2015/02/18/caucasus-jihadism-through-western-eyes-the-failure-of-american-rusology-to-understand-the-north-caucasus-mujahedin/. In the end, Radio Liberty, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Jamestown Foundation, Stratfor, the Hoover Institution, and just about the entire field of rusology got it wrong. I got it right because I had no agenda and do not believe that just because the Russians say something it has to be false. Those mentioned above who largely believe that cost us the lives of four Americans and facilitated the wounding of 200 others on a spring day in Boston just over two years ago.
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Gordon M. Hahn is an Analyst and Advisory Board Member of the Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, Chicago, Illinois; Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View – Russia Media Watch; and Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor, MonTREP, Monterey, California. Dr Hahn is author of three well-received books, Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), which was named an outstanding title of 2007 by Choice magazine, and The ‘Caucasus Emirate’ Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland Publishers, 2014). He also has authored hundreds of articles in scholarly journals and other publications on Russian, Eurasian and international politics and wrote, edited and published the Islam, Islamism, and Politics in Eurasia Report at CSIS from 2010-2013. Dr. Hahn has been a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2011-2013) and a Visiting Scholar at both the Hoover Institution and the Kennan Institute.