In 2013, the United States suffered its worst terrorist bombing since 9/11 at the annual running of the Boston Marathon. When the culprits turned out to be U.S. residents of Chechen descent, Americans were shocked and confused. Why would members of an obscure Russian minority group consider America their enemy? Inferno in Chechnya is the first book to answer this riddle by tracing the roots of the Boston attack to the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia. Brian Glyn Williams describes the tragic history of the bombers' war-devastated homeland-including tsarist conquest and two bloody wars with post-Soviet Russia that would lead to the rise of Vladimir Putin-showing how the conflict there influenced the rise of Europe's deadliest homegrown terrorist network. He provides a historical account of the Chechens' terror campaign in Russia, documents their growing links to Al Qaeda and radical Islam, and describes the plight of the Chechen diaspora that ultimately sent two Chechens to Boston. Inferno in Chechnya delivers a fascinating and deeply tragic story that has much to say about the historical and ethnic roots of modern terrorism.

The Duty to Investigate

Fighting for God and greed

A document of war and strife during the 1990s, this volume of photographs by the photojournalist James Nachtwey includes dramatic and shocking images of human suffering in Rwanda, Somalia, Romania, Bosnia, Chechnya and India, a well as photographs of the conflict in Kosovo. An essay by the author Luc Sante is included. The book is published to coincide with an exhibition of Nachtwey's work at the International Centre of Photography, New York.

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In Chechnya: The Inside Story author Mairbek Vatchagaev chronicles the dramatic events that took place in Chechnya during the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Engaged on one side of the Russian-Chechen conflict, he presents what he witnessed, how he became involved, how the struggle with Russia and the internal Chechen rivalries evolved, and how it impacted his family, his friends, his acquaintances, and the Chechen people.

The true story of one woman's struggle to save her sons from radicalization by Chechen partisans, as told by a seasoned war reporter. In All Lara's Wars, the great events of the last half-century--the realignment of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise in the Middle East of ISIS and its quest for a new Caliphate--converge in this account of a Chechen-Georgian family whose two sons become radicalized, and how their mother--Lara--travels to Syria by bus and at great risk, not to join them but to bring them home. By then, the older son is a high level commander and the younger son a respected soldier in ISIS's army. The story is told with a sense of wonder at the contemporary world and all the ways it resembles a primitive and violent land where all struggles are to the death, and there is an epic battle going on between forces of good and evil that cannot be understood other than as mythic and larger than life. Lara is a Kist--one of a tiny ethnicity that crossed the Caucasus mountains a century ago to settle in the remote Pankisi Gorge in northern Georgia, a peaceful and isolated paradise. She married a Chechen, moved to Grozny, and became the mother of two sons. When war came to Chechnya, she took her children home to the safe Georgian valley, and later sent them to Western Europe to live with their father--to protect them from the influence of the radical Islamic freedom fighters who had come to the Pankisi Gorge as refugees from the Chechnyan wars. As in all of Wojciech Jagielski's books, he tells here the story of any modern war, how the individual lives of civilians and combatants are obliterated in the sweep of the larger narrative--and how the humanity of these individual lives is revealed, and the price paid in human endurance and persistence and loss. Jagielski observes, listening to Lara and letting her story emerge through the filter of his literary skill. This unusual reportage tells us the facts of the Chechnyan wars and the reality of the Syrian war from the viewpoint of ISIS recruits, but it is also the true account of one ordinary family that became part of the larger tragedy that has claimed so many victims in recent years.