PANKISI GORGE, Georgia — The day before brothers and Chechen émigrés Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev allegedly detonated two bombs at the Boston Marathon, I sat across from another Chechen displaced by his homeland's devastating wars with the Russian military. Having survived a childhood of violence, he had just returned to this village in the Georgian mountains from a different battlefield -- Syria.
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Since the second Chechen war began in 1999, more than 190,000 Chechens (nearly 20 percent of Chechnya's population) have applied for asylum in the West, and thousands more have been displaced throughout the former Soviet Union.
With family in both Russia and Georgia, Abu Hamza, as he asked to be called, has been crossing back and forth across the border between the two countries for most of his 29 years. Late last year, in an unraveling marriage and only able to find sporadic work, he followed his brother-in-law to Syria. There, he joined a group of 60 or so militants opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- one of the thousands of independent brigades that make up the so-called Free Syrian Army.
"I went there because I saw videos on the Internet of innocent women and children being killed by the regime. I wanted to fight the [Syrian] government and help the opposition; I wanted to kill Bashar," he said.
Wearing a faded Adidas windbreaker over a camouflage T-shirt, Abu Hamza spoke of his two and a half months skirmishing with the Syrian military as if it were a summer-camp adventure at which he met like-minded men of diverse backgrounds. He declined to tell me the name of his group for fear of compromising his comrades' safety, but he said they included 10 other Chechens, several Azeris, Indians, and Arabs, and even one American, whom he described as a "cool guy" even though the American struggled with languages other than English.
It was Abu Hamza's first war, and he said the group's members ranged from grizzled veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya to 16-year-old boys who had never held a rifle. Although he spoke no Arabic before arriving, he said many of the other Chechens had picked it up through studies in Egypt or past campaigns fighting in the Middle East.
Still, most Chechens he encountered in Syria were from neither the Caucasus nor the Middle East, but from the thousands of refugee families scattered across Europe.
"They came from everywhere you can find a Chechen in Europe," he said.
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