Inferno in Chechnya
The Russian-Chechen Wars, the Al Qaeda Myth, and the Boston Marathon Bombings
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
In 2013, the United States suffered its worst terrorist bombing since 9/11 at the annual running of the Boston Marathon. When the culprits turned out to be U.S. residents of Chechen descent, Americans were shocked and confused. Why would members of an obscure Russian minority group consider America their enemy? Inferno in Chechnya is the first book to answer this riddle by tracing the roots of the Boston attack to the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia. Brian Glyn Williams describes the tragic history of the bombers’ war-devastated homeland—including tsarist conquest and two bloody wars with post-Soviet Russia that would lead to the rise of Vladimir Putin—showing how the conflict there influenced the rise of Europe’s deadliest homegrown terrorist network. He provides a historical account of the Chechens’ terror campaign in Russia, documents their growing links to Al Qaeda and radical Islam, and describes the plight of the Chechen diaspora that ultimately sent two Chechens to Boston. Inferno in Chechnya delivers a fascinating and deeply tragic story that has much to say about the historical and ethnic roots of modern terrorism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams (The Last Warlord), an expert on the Islamic history of the Caucasus and Central Asia, critically examines the status that Chechens have earned as jihadi terrorists, and dismantles it as a modern fiction. He details centuries of Russian oppression suffered by Chechens, making a strong case that Chechen secessionists aimed "to achieve the sort of independence from Russia that full Soviet Socialist Republics such as Lithuania and Ukraine had achieved." The Sufi Islam of the region has historically been tolerant and moderate; Arab volunteers drawn to the current conflicts brought with them a fundamentalist creed as alien to Chechens as Russian Orthodoxy. Nonetheless, stories of bloodthirsty Chechen battalions fighting with bin Laden in Afghanistan were gleefully propagated by Putin and credulously repeated in the Western media after 9/11. Williams interviewed hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan and found none who knew of any Chechens the sole Chechen he encountered was fighting on the Americans' side. The Boston attack by the Chechen-Dagestani Tsarnaev brothers caused an abrupt transition in the narrative, but the brothers spent barely six months in Chechnya as children and were apparently self-radicalized on the Internet. Writing for casual readers, Williams clearly reveals that Chechnya's reputation for harboring terrorists is largely unwarranted.
