Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout earlier today, appears to have been sympathetic to Islamist radicalism. Five months ago, he appears to have created a channel on YouTube called Terrorists. The channel features videos from the one of the leaders of the insurgency in Dagestan, who goes by the name Amir Abu Dudzhan. YouTube appears to have removed two of the videos but in a third features Dudzhan calling for jihad. Holding a Kalashnikov rifle, he says, “Jihad is the duty of every able-bodied Muslim.” Among the other videos on his channel is one of Timur Mutsuraev, the bard of the Chechen resistance in the 1990s; it features his song “We Will Devote Our Lives to Jihad.”
The younger brother, Dzhokhar, attended school from 1999 to 2001 in the Russian republic of Dagestan, a war-torn part of Russia next to Chechnya, according to his page on the Russian social-networking site Vkontakte. But even though Dzhokhar’s page indicates an interest in conflicts and causes that have at times been connected to terrorism, no solid evidence has emerged to suggest that he is motivated by religious or nationalist causes.
So why attack in the US? They should be targeting the Moscow Marathon or Russian Embassy for this to make sense