All Categories - Most Popular Recently. Flickr. 1x.com. Time Lightbox. On April 19, when the FBI announced that two brothers from southern Russia had bombed the Boston Marathon, the world’s attention quickly turned to where these brothers had come from — a lush strip of highlands called Dagestan, which stretches along the western shore of the Caspian Sea. The elder of the two suspected bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had spent half of last year in this region of Russia, visiting his parents and reconnecting with his relatives. He also spent a lot of time hanging out with local adherents of Salafism, the fundamentalist brand of Islam that Tsarnaev also seems to have embraced. Since the bombings in Boston, TIME has spent three weeks in Dagestan trying to learn what, if anything, the region’s Islamists had to do with Tsarnaev’s radicalization (to read the article, which is available to subscribers, click here ).
The region’s insurgency and counterinsurgency have killed thousands of people over the last decade and shaped the lives of many more. FotoFest International. The Atlantic. Last month, reports surfaced, later confirmed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, that the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency has been delivering bags of cash to Karzai for a decade, in part to buy continued access and cooperation during the war. The New York Times reported that the payments had not resulted in the influence the CIA sought, and had instead fueled corruption and empowered warlords. A further report by the U.N. stated that opium cultivation across Afghanistan had increased for the third year in a row. As Western troops continue the long process of preparing for their December 2014 withdrawal, evidence of significant progress in Afghanistan remains elusive.
Accueil. Viviane Sassen. Guy Smallman.