( CNN ) -- The Boston Marathon bombings shook the nation . With one suspect killed and the other captured Friday night , there are far more questions than answers at this point . While authorities unravel details in the coming days and weeks , many people are curious about Chechnya and its history , hoping to better understand the background of the two suspected bombers . The important thing to keep in mind right now is that 26-year-old Tamarlan Tsarnaev had a green card , and 19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev became a naturalized U.S. citizen in September 2012 . Assuming that their motives are related to their Chechen origins would be like assuming that Timothy McVeigh 's motives were related to his Scottish/Irish origins . Although the Tsarnaev brothers are of Chechen ethnic background , they are from the neighboring republic of Dagestan -- a tremendously diverse region that differs from Chechnya in many ways . According to press reports , they fled Dagestan for distant Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia sometime before or during the second Chechen war with Russia , which started in 1999 and spilled over into Dagestan . It is likely that they found many Chechen contacts in these new homes , which still have a Chechen diaspora remaining from Joseph Stalin 's forced deportation of the Chechen people to those republics in 1944 . From Kyrgyzstan , they emigrated to the United States in 2002 . Chechnya is a small republic within the Russian Federation of about a million people located in the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian seas . The Chechens have a long history of intense conflict with Russia . In fact , even after encircling the region through the conquest of Georgia , Armenia and Azerbaijan to the south in 1801 , it still took the mighty Russian army 60 more years to conquer the region . In 1944 , Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin accused the Chechens of treason and deported every man , woman and child to locations scattered through Soviet Central Asia in a brutal action with high death rates . The deported Chechen people were only allowed to return in 1957 , four years after Stalin 's death . It is quite likely that the grandparents or great-grandparents of the Tsarnaevs suffered through these horrible actions . When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 , 15 constituent republics became independent countries , but Chechnya was just an autonomous region within the Russian Federation , and Russian President Boris Yeltsin refused to allow Chechnya to break free and form an independent state . In 1994 , he ordered the invasion of Chechnya to reverse its declaration of independence and to force the region back under Moscow 's control . The two-year war and the years that followed were filled with violence , chaos and lawlessness . Estimates of Chechens killed in the 1990s run as high as 100,000 . Dagestan was for the most part able to avoid the violence of the 1990s and stayed relatively quiet . Both Tsarnaev brothers most likely heard a lot about the second war between Russia and Chechnya that started in 1999 , a war that this time involved parts of Dagestan as well . This time , a radical Chechen warlord named Shamil Basaev tried to spread anti-Russian unrest to the much larger neighboring region of Dagestan . With a small army , he took several towns in Dagestan and a month later four residential apartments were blown up in Moscow and two other Russian cities , killing and injuring hundreds . He found little support from the peoples of Dagestan and instead spurred newly appointed Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to launch a new war against Chechnya . This round of fighting was even more brutal than the first war . Extreme Chechen groups turned to guerrilla warfare in the mountains , and horrific acts of terror in Russia , including the Beslan elementary school siege that ended with 334 people dead , including 186 children . Other acts included setting off bombs in the Moscow subway system and taking an entire Moscow theater hostage . Both the pro-Russian Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his various Chechen underground jihadist and nationalist opponents have denied any connection to the Tsarnaevs . The question of their links to any groups will be one of the most important questions for the investigation to come . In the past few years , both the Tsarnaevs excelled in sports and academics , and seem to have lived apparently normal lives . It remains to be seen whether their life experiences , nationalist or religious ideas led them to the Boston Marathon bombings -- or if their motives were more akin to the domestic mass killers we have seen far too often in places like Aurora , Newtown , Tucson , Columbine , and elsewhere . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eric Lohr .
The two suicide bombers of the Boston Marathon are of Chechen ethnic background . Eric Lohr : People are curious about Russia and want to know more about the people . He says they went through wars and chaos . Others : It 's hard to say whether their personal experiences or other factors led them to their actions .