The revelation that the two brothers suspected to be behind the Boston Marathon attack are ethnic Chechens has led the US establishment to perform a rapid volte-face towards the previously sympathetically-viewed region and cause.
Through the two separatist wars fought by Chechen militants in the 1990s, the standard US portrayal of the restive region focused on the David and Goliath scale of the adversaries, the ‘denial’ to Chechens of their right to self-determination, and the abuse of human rights.
In the wake of Monday’s attack, a new sinister international image of Chechnya has emerged.
“Chechnya region is cauldron of Islamic militancy” proclaimed the headline in the New York Daily News. For LA Times, it was “Festering Chechen militancy”, while the Washington Times went with“Chechnya is a hotbed of Islamic extremism”.
USA Today, Fox News and the Washington Post all simply picked “Chechnya is a breeding ground for terrorism”, as their header.
The international experts now offered a different narrative of the conflict that has bedeviled Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and cost thousands of lives as well as draining billions of dollars from the budget.
"The [second Chechen conflict in 1999] war initially began as a nationalist war but very, very quickly metastasized into something that looks much more like the radical Salafi-Jihadi movements we've seen in other regions around the world," Christopher Swift, a professor of National Security at Georgetown University, told ABC News...............
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