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" WASHINGTON \u2014 It appears that we are all going to have to bone up on the bloody conflict between Russia and the attempts by Chechnya to break away and found what likely would have been an Islamic Republic. It has been a long and terrible war, fought with remarkable savagery by both sides. (See C. J. Chivers&amp;#039; remarkable piece, &amp;quot;The School,&amp;quot; posted elsewhere on the blog. For its part, the Russian military reduced the Chechen capital of Grozny to ashes.) Just from my limited review this morning, it would appear to be something of a mistake to lump the indigienous Chechnyan fighters in the general category of &amp;quot;Islamic terrorists,&amp;quot; although that seems to be where the mass media is headed, alas. (Jake Tapper just compared these two guys to the Fort Hood shooter and how he had &amp;quot;radicalized&amp;quot; himself.) There is an undeniable element of Chechen nationalism involved as well. The violence there, as Chivers points out, arises from a tangled mass of sources. Religion is only one very thin strand of it. If, as it appears now, these two brothers were refugees from the Chechnyan wars, they could have been &amp;quot;radicalized&amp;quot; by dozens of different things, including simple savagery. This was also the case of much of the bloodletting in the Balkans. The one thing the Iron Curtain did was keep a lid on all of this. When the Soviet Union dissolved, all of it exploded in a hundred directions. As Chivers reporting tells us:  Short of the capital, the terrain becomes steep and scarred with artillery trenches, from which Russian batteries long ago fired their barrages. The city beyond these hills is a ruin, a warren of rubble and shattered buildings in which many of the remaining inhabitants camp in the wreckage of their homes. In the annals of recent conflict, few places have seen such a multiplicity of horrors and then fallen so swiftly from the public discourse. After Chechnya declared independence in 1991, prompting Russia to invade three years later, the Chechens became a source of fascination in the West. They were tribesmen who merged mountain traditions with modern life, an Islamic people speaking their own language, bound by ancient codes of honor and hospitality, and seeking independence as they fought armored columns in front of their homes. Their symbol was the wolf, but they were underdogs, local people who seemed to win skirmishes against a world power with little more than rifles and the force of will. No matter those moments of military success, the Chechens&amp;#039; separatist urges have led nearly to their destruction. Russia and the rebels signed a cease-fire in 1996, and the Russian military withdrew, leaving behind a rebel-led government. Chechen independence and self-governance had been born. The result was disastrous. The young government, which inherited formidable problems and had little aid or revenue, was largely abandoned by the Kremlin, which seemed eager for it to fail. Inexperienced and prone to internal quarrels, it proved barely capable of governing and flashed an affinity for ancient notions of Islamic law, going so far as to show public executions on TV. Crime soared, corruption was unchecked, and ransom kidnappings became common enough to have the feel of an approved line of work. Whatever the merits of the conventional portrait of the Chechen rebel, war and rackets warped many of them out of popular form, leading them to lives of thuggery and organized crime. Chechnya&amp;#039;s people waited for autonomy to improve their lot. But nationalism led to warlordism, and warlordism to more sinister associations. Some prominent commanders, including Shamil Basayev, allied themselves with international Islamic movements that had taken root in Pakistan and Afghanistan, steering the republic deeper into isolation and attracting foreign jihadis to the slopes of the Caucasus. With Basayev&amp;#039;s blessing, a dark-maned Arab field commander who used the name Ibn al-Khattab and had fought in Afghanistan and Tajikistan opened training camps in the mountains. Recruits arrived from Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus, especially from nearby Ingushetia, and from Turkey, Central Asia, and Arabia. They studied weapons, tactics, and the manufacture of bombs. Under the sway of fighters, autonomous Chechnya was recognized by only one foreign government: Afghanistan&amp;#039;s Taliban. Spurred by Prime Minister Putin, who was soon to become president, Russia sent its armor back to Chechnya in 1999. This time Russia fought unsparingly. With little regard for life or property, its military surrounded Grozny and pounded the capital with rockets, artillery, and aircraft, collapsing the city around the rebels. Sweeps and barrages destroyed villages and towns. The destruction was of an order not seen since World War II; Grozny&amp;#039;s sagging hulks invited comparisons to Warsaw, 1944. The city fell early in 2000, and Putin, by then president, declared the battle ended. A new policy took shape. Russia would garrison troops and equipment and provide money, instructions, and political support. But local administration was to be handed over to Chechens deemed sufficiently loyal, a formula flowing from the institutional memory of a weakened empire. The appointment of proxies was accompanied by a message that became more hollow the more it was repeated on state TV: There is no war. We have won. No verified casualty counts exist for the wars, but all agree the human toll has been vast, ranging from tens of thousands of Chechens killed to more than two hundred thousand. Setting aside the numbers, the years of violence and atrocities made clear that as public policy, little could be less wise than extensive killing in Chechnya, where tradition asks blood to be washed in blood. Chechens are bound by adat, an oral code that compels families to avenge the killing of their relatives. By the time President Putin claimed victory, enough blood had been spilled for a fury lasting generations. It mixed not just tribal urges for revenge and independence but racism and militant Islam. The worst explanations are the simplest ones. This is something we should all remember. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a22241/the-places-where-violence-comes-from/>