Skip to footer

Chechnya: How a remote Russian republic became linked with terrorism

The main suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing are two brothers from Chechnya, a Russian republic that has been the scene of cyclical revolts and brutal crackdowns for the past 200 years.

How did Chechnya become linked with terrorism?

Sergey Ponomarev/AP/File
Women grieve at a Sept. 2008 memorial for those killed in 2004 when Chechen-led terrorists took a school hostage in Beslan, Russia, in 2004. More than 330 people – including 186 children – died during the siege and the confused storming of the school on Sept. 3, 2004.

During Russia's second assault on Chechnya, most of the little republic's first wave of independence-seeking leaders, who had espoused secular nationalism, were either killed or defected to the Russian side. Militant Islamists, seeking to create a Caucasus-wide "caliphate," took over the movement and found tactical inspiration, as well as material support, from Middle Eastern Islamist terror networks like Al Qaeda. The Islamist insurrection has since spread to neighboring republics, especially Ingushetia and Dagestan.

Chechen-led terrorists have struck repeatedly in the Russian heartland, notably a mass hostage-taking at a downtown Moscow theater in 2002 that killed 130 people and a horrific school siege in Beslan, North Ossetia, that killed 330 people, half of them children. A double suicide bombing by "black widow" terrorists – wives of rebels killed by Russian security forces – left 40 people dead in a 2010 Moscow metro attack and another suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport the next year left 35 people dead.

3 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.