A Search For Answers In The Boston Bombings
DETROIT (WWJ) - There's a rush to know as much as possible about the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings. Could their roots in the war-torn Russian region of Chechnya have something to do with it?
Saeed Kahn a Wayne State lecturer on Near-East studies says it's unlikely that the two issues are related.
"And so what we have here is a group of people who are identifying themselves as Chechen when they know fully well the United States has never been involved in the Chechen conflict," said Kahn.
Kahn continues that the bombing in Boston is not the end result of the long history of conflict in central Asia.
"This is not by any measure a war that has been waging for 1400 years - which sort of culminated on Boylston Street in Boston," he said.
"With their baseball hats backward and in every other way these have become not necessarily radicalized but they have become Americanized. So was this that rather boring trope of teen angst which now had played itself off in a rather violent and horrific way in the streets of Boston."
Kahn also says the pair's roots in Chechnya likely didn't play a part in the alleged attack since the US has never had any involvement in the conflict.
"It is an area like any part of the world has seen it's fair shares of conflict but to go ahead and then appropriate that and bring it into the current context seems like a far stretch - particularly with what happened in Boston."
"We have seen examples of ... domestic radicalization particularly in the Somali - American community but in that trajectory it was by and large it was them just joining the Al-Sheba group and wanting to go back to Somalia to participate in the civil war that was brewing there," added Kahn.
