The identities of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing — Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 — appear tentatively to confirm several of Stratfor's suspicions. From this profile, the simple nature of the attack, their efforts to rob a convenience store and their lack of an escape plan, we can at least say that they were what we refer to as grassroots militants. According to The New York Times, the two men are from the Russian republic of Chechnya. Their family also reportedly lived briefly in Makhachkala, Dagestan, before moving to the United States in 2002. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's profile on VKontakte, a Russian social media website, said he attended school at the School No. 1 of Makhachkala, spoke English, Russian and Chechen and listed his worldview as Islam. A school administrator from the School No. 1 said the two suspects and their family had previously lived in Kyrgyzstan before moving to Dagestan. Given that they are grassroots actors, there is likely only a small chance that the authorities will discover a formal link between the suspects and a state sponsor or a professional terrorist group such as al Qaeda or one of its franchise groups. This case also highlights our analysis that the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from grassroots operatives who live in the West rather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas. This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in severity but broadened in scope in recent years — a trend we expect to continue.
