Chechen war children grow up to be monsters

Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was a flashpoint in both of the Chechen separatist wars with Russia that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Street battles, artillery shelling and aerial bombardment in the mid-1990s, and again in 1999 and 2000, leveled the city. /Image via historyofrussia.org

After variously simmering and exploding into violence over the past 20 years largely out of the media spotlight, the breakaway regions of the Russian Caucasus have become a focal point of the biggest story in the world.

It's too early to say whether the brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were radicalized by the fighting in their homeland. But it's unlikely they would have been in the United States were it not for the struggle between Russia and separatists in Caucasus regions such as Chechnya and Georgia.

Two wars have been fought in Chechnya since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian President Boris Yeltsin waged the first from 1994 to 1996, and Vladimir Putin started the second as part of his rise to power in 1999. Intense fighting into 2000 was followed by years of Russian counterinsurgency warfare that ultimately led to relative stability under President Ramzan Kadyrov, who has been accused of running Chechnya as a brutal dictator.

Horrific warfare, human rights abuses and political assassinations have been hallmarks of Chechen life for the past two decades. Two children of this war-scarred generation apparently grew up to be the monsters of the Boston Marathon bombings.

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