Chechens, are you goddamned kidding me? I admit to being completely taken by surprise here, but the pieces fit together with eerie accuracy.
The two prime suspects in the Boston bombing, apparently two Chechen brothers Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, highjacked a vehicle in the course of their activity this morning, and told the driver they were the Boston bombers. One of them is currently dead, the other on the run.
For those of you who are not aware, Chechens come from Chechnya. Russia has been dealing with them for decades; specifically, the batshit ones who keep pulling terrorist shit all over the region, particularly in Russia. Most Chechen terrorism is religiously motivated; this is a side effect of strong Chechen separatist movements which have been strongly based on identity politics with an Islamic focus since about WWII; they cropped up in earnest right around the time the Soviet Union attempted its first major "Russification" of Chechnya. At one point in the not too distant past, an Islamic militia from Chechnya attempted to liberate a neighboring region based on a referendum from an Islamic authority.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Chechnya had built itself up as an independent state on par with most other former Soviet states. Unfortunately, the newly minted post-USSR Russia, didn't agree with the progress they'd made.
The struggle culminated in a series of wars in the early 1990s, and have simmered as a long string of hijackings, bombings, and guerrilla warfare on one side; and sanctions, bombings, and paramilitary action on the other.
A good number of Chechen Muslims have shown up in Afghanistan over the years to do Jihad there as well. They're typically the best equipped and trained "foreign fighters" in the theater, mainly due to the large institutional experience of the radical communities in Chechnya. In Afghanistan, Chechens in your neighborhood is bad bad news. They're typically not affiliated with Al Qaeda or the TTP, and are not interested in showboating. They show up to kill infidels and only to kill infidels, don't usually release puffed up propaganda, and have often been reported as using Afghanistan as a way to get operational experience to take back to their homeland to continue fighting there.
It's unclear right now exactly how long the bombers have been in the United States, but at least one local woman has reported that she went to middle school with one of them. They lived in Turkey before the United States, and both are legal permanent residents. Dartmouth in a press release this morning also reports that one of them was enrolled as a student there; the other graduated Cambridge in 2011.
In any case, late last night they went on a petty crime spree, and then early this morning they ambushed a campus police officer at MIT. They had a carload of IEDs, and were both armed and wearing suicide vests.
After a protracted shootout with responding officers, during which the suspects threw bombs and shot at police a hundred times or so, one is dead and the other is on the loose, probably still wearing his suicide vest.
I'll admit to being taken completely by surprise at Chechen radicals being responsible, but it certainly does fit with the classic tactics and planning involved.
Boston is on lockdown, public transit closed, and people ordered to stay indoors.
If you'd like to watch the local news in Boston, you can do so here.
Addendum: One of the suspects' uncles has given an impassioned speech to local Boston news television claiming that although they are Chechen Muslims, that "someone else" must have radicalized the bombers, and that anybody claiming Islam is responsible for this is incorrect. He's asked the remaining bomber to turn himself in, so as not to further taint the name of Chechens everywhere.