The uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said that the bombings had nothing to do with religion, that that charge is a fraud, he said, because he knew the family and the boys as children (i.e. he knew them to have been raised as secularists). Someone, he said, ‘radicalized them.’
Well, duh. Of course, Chechnya is not religious. It was part of the USSR. Nobody practiced any religion in the USSR. Since its collapse, it became fashionable among the very rich, the very uneducated, and the very nationalistic to fake some sort of religious allegiance but these attempts are always quite ridiculous. The idea of the fundamentalist Muslim Chechnya is promoted by Russian neo-Nazis,
So whenever you hear of a religious person with a Soviet heritage, it’s a good time to laugh.

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