Boston bomb suspects: the family at the heart of terror

They grew up in America, went to American schools, met American friends. One married an American wife. So what turned the Tsarnaev brothers into the kind of people who would wreak such devastating harm? Was there anything about their family that might explain it?

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead: we shall never know for sure what motivated him. But the first pieces of information from the interrogation of his surviving brother Dzhokhar have begun to emerge.

According to sources quoted in the US media, the younger Tsarnaev says Tamerlan was the driving force behind the planning and execution of the Boston bombing. He insists no foreign terror groups were involved. Instead, he became radicalised through watching videos, inspired by religion and the notion that Islam was under attack.

This, then, was a kind of home-made extremism: experts would call it self-radicalisation. But it was not born out of thin air. The Tsarnaev family were fundamentally displaced. They had moved from Kyrgyzstan to Dagestan, to America, before the parents returned to Dagestan. Their homes were everywhere, and nowhere.

A family displaced

The suspects’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, was one of 10 children. His own family had been deported from Chechnya to Kyrgyzstan under the Stalin regime, as part of its policy of suppressing Chechen nationalism.

This did not stop many of the family doing well. Some of his siblings became lawyers, while Anzor got a job in the prosecutor’s office in the capital, Bishkek. But when war broke out in Chechnya in 1999, he was fired.

He found work as a mechanic, moved to Dagestan, dreamed of America. In the early 2000s, he moved there, joining a brother who had already settled in the Boston area. His wife Zubeidat, who he had met in college, went to beauty school and worked as a facialist in a local spa.

They sent their sons to the local high school in Cambridge, Massachussetts, a well-regarded school which educates the children of the liberal academic elite alongside working class immigrants.

According to the Wall Street Journal, it was Zubeidat and Tamerlan who turned to religion; it was Zubeidat who persuaded her older son into a more intense form of Islam, fearing he was “slipping into a life of marijuana, girls and alcohol”.

She herself began reading more, growing more radical. She left the spa and began working from home, where there were no men. Encouraged by Tamerlan, she began wearing more modest dress and covering her hair with the hijab.

In a post which rapidly went viral, the young Boston writer Alyssa Kilzer described how she had been going to Zubeidat for facials for years, when things started to change. Mrs Tsarnaeva, she says, became increasingly religious, often fasting, and quoting conspiracy theories about 11 September.

The changes were even more pronounced in Tamerlan, who became increasingly aggressive about his Islamic views, and even gave up boxing for the sake of religion.

Turning to extremes

Their father, Anzor, was not comfortable with these changes in his wife and son: he grew so frustrated, he eventually left home. The marriage broke down. Both parents returned to Dagestan, leaving their children in the United States.

Abdullah Duduyev, editor of the Caucaus-based magazine Dosh, told Reuters the breakdown of the family model had created a dangerous vacuum. “The traditional Chechen family model makes the father the absolute head of a family. In case the father is away, the older brother runs the affairs.”

Their aunt, Pateimat Suleimanova, said Tamerlan’s influence over the rest of the family had grown. “Nowadays the children study Islam and teach their parents, and that’s exactly how it turned out with him.”

The all-American girl he had met in a Boston nightclub, Katherine Russell, who had been raised in Rhode Island by a quiet, Christian family, dropped out of college, converted to Islam, began wearing a veil.

Meanwhile the father, who insisted “I’m sure about my children, in their purity”, was thousands of miles away and had not seen them for more than a year. Their mother, who told Channel 4 News today “I never raised my kids bad”, may have been the source of their radicalisation.

For the Tsarnaev brothers, though, there was no family horror story, no violence, no history of abuse. Just fragments of disjointed, unsettled lives that no-one could have predicted would end in such tragic events.

Felicity Spector writes about US affairs for Channel 4 News