Back at College, Suspect Called Boston Bombs 'Crazy': Classmate

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14. Yes and no. He said

'These tragedies happen all the time in Afghanistan and Iraq,' and the fact is, about his family's home territory,

Search for Home Led Suspect to Land Marred by Strife.

According to his aunt, he was born in Kalmykia, a barren patch of Russian territory along the Caspian Sea. His family moved to Kyrgyzstan, an independent former Soviet republic in Central Asia, then to Chechnya, the turbulent republic in the Russian Federation that is his father’s ancestral home. Then to Dagestan. . .

Dagestan may have made him feel more at home than the United States, but it was a strange place to find comfort, given the nearly nonstop violence and the persistent unease it engenders among those who live here.

In the days just before Mr. Tsarnaev visited, a 13-year-old was wounded after picking up a package booby-trapped with a hand grenade, and a traffic police post was fired upon by someone with a grenade launcher.

Two weeks after his arrival, another grenade was tossed in a residential area. It was apparently meant to draw the police into an ambush, because several minutes later, in a pattern eerily similar to the marathon bombing, a larger bomb hidden in a garbage pail went off, killing a small child and injuring another.

And so it went all the time he was in Dagestan: two or three deadly bombings a month on average, constant “special operations” in which the federal police killed dozens of people they said were Muslim insurgents, and numerous other attacks.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/world/europe/pilgrim-in-violent-land-suspect-found-comfort-in-d