Boston bombers were angered by US wars in the Muslim world

New York: The radicalized Muslim brothers Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, were motivated by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to take their violence to the Boston Marathon. From his hospital bed, where he is now listed in fair condition, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, made the revelation under questioning by interrogators. The 19-year-old has acknowledged his role in planting the shrapnel-laden bombs near the Boston Marathon finish line on April 15, officials told The Washington Post on Tuesday. America now confronts a very different terrorist threat than it did a decade ago on 9/11. As seen in the Boston bombing, the threat of homegrown terrorists in the US now rivals that of plots hatched overseas. The Tsarnaev brothers don’t appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. [caption id=“attachment_723503” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The Boston bombing was the worst bombing on US soil since security was tightened after the terrorist attacks on 11 September, 2001. AP[/caption] Still-hospitalized Dzhokhar, who can barely speak because of a gunshot wound to the throat, scribbled notes to indicate that he and his slain brother Tamerlan were acting on their own. Officials told the Post that the evidence so far suggests the brothers were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and US actions in the Muslim world. “Dzhokhar has specifically cited the US war in Iraq, which ended in December 2011 with the removal of the last American forces, and the war in Afghanistan, where President Obama plans to end combat operations by the end of 2014,” reported the Post. The ethnic Chechen brothers emigrated to the US a decade ago from Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region in Russia’s Caucasus. Tamerlan was a US resident and Dzhokhar became a US citizen last year. “These are persons operating inside the United States without a nexus” to an overseas group, a US intelligence official said. In a piece called “Boston bombs: Obama lulled America into false confidence over terror threat,” Peter Foster, the US editor for Telegraph, argues that the attacks “bring home the complexity of the global Islamist threat and the fact that it cannot be confined to wars in distant lands, or fought at arm’s length using drones, as the Obama administration has quietly yet insistently led America to believe.” Indeed, the FBI’s phenomenal success has made the threat of terrorism less visible in America. US intelligence agencies have foiled several bombing attempts. In 2010, Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad was sentenced to life in prison for driving a car containing an explosive into New York’s Times Square. Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to supporting al-Qaeda and plotting in 2009 to attack New York subways. Again, thanks to the FBI, Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s singed underwear with a packet of powder sewn into the crotch, is all that remained of al Qaeda’s attempt to down an American passenger plane over Detroit in 2009. Of course, the US spends more resources on thwarting terrorist attempts than the rest of the world put together. After 9/11 the amount of money America spent on intelligence had risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which Newsweek described as a gross underestimate). But all the money in the world can’t sometimes stop a suicidal terrorist. The Tsarnaev brothers underscore the new reality that there is a threat from violent Islamic extremism from within the US. More than a dozen Americans have been captured by the US government and its allies over the past three years for actively supporting jihad. Some, like the Tsarnaev brothers were angered by the US involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Post was quick to point out that Obama has made repairing US relations with the Islamic world a foreign policy priority, even as he has expanded drone operations in Pakistan and other countries, which has inflamed Muslim public opinion. Still, it is worth mulling that there are disaffected, alienated people everywhere in the US who, for decades, have joined gangs and cults in search of an identity. Radical Islamist groups are yet another destination for those who seek purpose in their lives, experts say. The Boston bombing was the worst bombing on US soil since security was tightened after the terrorist attacks on 11 September, 2001. It killed three people and wounded over 250