Just recall for a moment topics such as Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and the
northern Caucasus region of Russia, where Islamic radicalism is alive and well.
Turkish authorities have so far refrained from naming the suicide bomber but reports in Turkey and Russia on Friday identified her as Diana Ramazanova, 18, from the
northern Caucasus region of Dagestan.
In some parts of the
Northern Caucasus and Central Asian regions, Islam is the main religion.
In Russia, the group has been active in the
Northern Caucasus as well as in the mainly Muslim Volga regions of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.
The three were childhood friends with roots in the
northern Caucasus, a hotbed of Islamist militancy, where they played football together.
Alexander Borodai, who calls himself the prime minister of the republic, said the fighters from the
northern Caucasus, although not ethnically Russian, ''share much of the same ideology.
The
Northern Caucasus and its vicinity already is a tinderbox; acquiring more territory with disaffected Muslims would undoubtedly yield further security challenges.
What is known already is that Caucasus Emirate, an organization that aspires to establish a hardline Islamic state in the
northern Caucasus is allied with Al Qaeda.
Russia has a far worse terrorism problem than the United States, because some six million citizens, living in the Muslim-majority republics of the
northern Caucasus, belong to various ethnic groups who see themselves as living under Russian occupation.
htm) Islamist insurgency which has spilled over to other regions of the
northern Caucasus, like Dagestan.
By contrast, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, weighed in with a piece on the Tsarnaev brothers that opened with Stalin's banishment of the Chechen people "from their homeland in the
northern Caucasus to Central Asia and the Siberian wastes".
The importance of the "Circassian question" (see table 1) is systematically muted by the Russian authorities insofar as it affects, firstly, policy towards Abkhazia, and, secondly, the situation in the
Northern Caucasus.