It has now been revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers were two Muslims from southern Russia near Chechnya: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with Massachusetts police early this morning, and his brother Dzhokhar, who as of this writing is still at large.
As more and more material comes to light about the pair, their motivations become clear. On a Russian-language social media page, Dzhokhar features a drawing of a bomb under the heading “send a gift,” and just above links to sites about Islam. Tamerlan’s YouTube page features two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Mohammed “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”
Tamerlan also says, “I’m very religious.” He notes that he does not drink alcohol because Allah forbids it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend has converted to Islam. Even his name indicates the world from which he comes: Tamerlan Tsarnaev is apparently named for the Muslim warrior Tamerlane.
Andrew Bostom wrote in 2005 that “Osama bin Laden was far from the first jihadist to kill infidels as an expression of religious piety….Osama lacks both Tamerlane’s sophisticated (for his time) military forces and his brilliance as a strategist. But both are or were pious Muslims who paid homage to religious leaders, and both had the goal of making jihad a global force.”
Read the full article, wich connects most of the dots of what we already know.