Who Are The Tsarnaev Brothers?

my god. wow RT @chrislhayes: This interview w/ the suspects’ uncle is *intense* bit.ly/103U4lV

— Ryan Chittum (@ryanchittum) April 19, 2013

David Kenner finds a photo album featuring the suspect who died in a firefight last night, Tamerlan Tsarnaev:

One of the most interesting insights into Tamerlan’s personality so far comes from a photo album, titled “Will Box For Passport,” that photographer Johannes Hirn took of the slain suspect. Tamerlan was apparently a boxer who hoped to gain citizenship by being selected for the U.S. Olympic team: “Unless his native Chechnya becomes independent, Tamerlan says he would rather compete for the United States than for Russia,” Hirn wrote.

Other captions paint Tamerlan as a devoted Muslim. “I’m very religious,” he says at one point, noting that he does not smoke or drink alcohol. “There are no values anymore,” he says, worrying that “people can’t control themselves.”

Tamerlan also appears isolated and bewildered by American life. “I don’t have a single American friend,” he laments, despite living in the United States for five years. “I don’t understand them.”

He also apparently had a YouTube channel. Serwer explains:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26 year-old brother of the second Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had a YouTube page where he posted religious videos, including a video of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter. Among those videos is one dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan which is embraced by Islamic extremists—particularly Al Qaeda. The videos posted on what appears to be Tsarnaev’s YouTube page may shed light on the motivations for the attack on the Boston Marathon. The prophecy states that an invincible army will come from the region of “Khurasan,” a large portion of territory in central Asia.

Weigel points to what appears to Tamerlan’s Amazon wishlist: