April 10, 2015

This week, on April 8, a jury in Boston found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty on all 30 counts for crimes committed in and around the bombing at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. The bombing was the worst terrorist act in the United States since September 11, 2001.

Two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. One of the two men who planted the bombs was found guilty this week. Credit: © Dan Lampariello, Reuters/Land

Two brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev,  planned and carried out the bombing at the Boston race. Three people there were killed and some 200 others were injured. Because of the nature of the bomb, a pressure-cooker filled with shrapnel, many of the injured lost limbs in the attack.

The Tsarnaevs were ethnic Chechens. The older brother, Tamerlan, had been born in Russia. Dzhokhar had been born in Kyrgyzstan but was a naturalized American citizen.  The prosecution in this case argued that both brothers had been radicalized by Islamic extremism. The defense argued that the older brother had brainwashed and dominated his younger brother to act in the bombing, but that Tamerlan was the engineer of the entire crime. (Tamerlan died in a shootout with police when caught soon after the bombing.)

The defense for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev never disputed his involvement in the crime. His lawyers are hoping to spare his life and presented him as someone who would not have acted without his brother’s bullying. The jury’s next job will be to decide on sentencing, and their choice is between the death penalty and life in prison without parole.

Experts pointed out that the trial left unanswered questions. One important point that never came to light was where the brothers manufactured their bomb. Police know that they did not use Tamerlan’s apartment or Dzhokhar’s college dorm room. If they used the home or garage of another person, was that person also involved in the bombing? It remains unanswered.

Other World Book articles: 

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Terrorism

May 30, 2014

Some 2,000 people, including 283 women and 567 children, have been killed so far this year by Syrian government air attacks in the northern city of Aleppo, reports the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based human rights group. The Syrian air force has dropped “barrel bombs” on the city in the government’s attempt to put down the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad. Barrel bombs, packed with explosives, are a crude and highly inaccurate weapon, generally rolled out of helicopters from a high altitude. They inflict massive damage, often devastating entire neighborhoods in the densely built-up areas of Aleppo controlled by rebel forces. The fighting in Aleppo has damaged much of the Old City, including the citadel and the suq, which are both UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Both rebels and government troops have for months attempted to end the stalemate in Aleppo, where the front lines have moved little in more than two years of fighting. Rebel-held areas of Aleppo have been subjected to fierce aerial bombardment since mid-December.

The forces of President Bashar al-Assad have destroyed much of the ancient city of Aleppo in their attempt to put down a rebellion. (AP/Wide World)

The rebellion in Syria, which led to the civil war, began in March 2011. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights–which has a network of activists in Syria reporting on the war–has tabulated that more than 162,000 people have been killed in the three-year conflict.

Additional World Book articles:

• Syria 2011 (a Back in Time article)
• Syria 2012 (a Back in Time article)
• Syria 2013 (a Back in Time article)
• Syria: The Roots of a Rebellion (a special report)

May 8, 2014

A massive explosion today in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo destroyed an historic, luxury hotel and triggered the collapse of several other buildings. A bomb, believed to have been set by rebel fighters, was detonated by remote control in a tunnel beneath the Carlton Citadel Hotel, adjacent to Aleppo’s medieval citadel and close to the city’s ancient suq. Government forces had been using the hotel as a base, and a number of security personnel and militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad are believed to have been killed in the explosion. The fighting in Aleppo has damaged much of the Old City, including the citadel and the suq, which are both UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Both rebels and government troops have for months attempted to end the stalemate in Aleppo, where the front lines have moved little in more than two years of fighting. Rebel-held areas of Aleppo have been subjected to fierce aerial bombardment since mid-December.

The last rebel forces withdrew from the city of Homs yesterday. Fierce fighting continues in the ancient city of Aleppo and across northern Syria. (World Book map; map data © MapQuest.com, Inc.)

According to the BBC’s correspondent in Syria, government forces have just assumed control of Homs, where nearly 1,000 rebels and their families evacuated yesterday from the city’s last rebel enclave. The United Nations’s resident coordinator in Syria noted to the BBC that while the withdrawal marks the end of three years of resistance, Homs–Syria’s third-largest city–is “incredibly and comprehensively destroyed.” The BBC correspondent reports that government forces are holding their own against rebels in Damascus, the capital, but the stalemate between rebels and government troops in the north “seems as durable as ever.” The rebellion in Syria, which led to the civil war, began in March 2011.

Additional World Book articles:

• Syria 2011 (a Back in Time article)
• Syria 2012 (a Back in Time article)
• Syria: The Roots of a Rebellion (a special report)

April 15, 2014

At least 70 people were killed and some 120 others wounded when the explosion of a massive bomb ripped through a bus station during the morning rush hour in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. At least 40 vehicles were destroyed, including 16 luxury buses.

Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, blamed the attack on Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist group that is attempting to turn Nigeria into a fundamentalist Islamic state under Shari`ah law. Nigeria is approximately half Muslim and 40 percent Christian. Muslims make up the majority of the population in the north. Christians live mainly in southern and central parts of Nigeria. Many Nigerians, especially in the rural areas, practice traditional religions based on the worship of multiple gods and spirits.

Boko Haram, a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization, operates mainly in northern and northeastern Nigeria, where the majority of people are Muslims. (World Book map; map data © MapQuest.com, Inc.)

In the past week, Boko Haram carried out attacks that left at least 64 people dead, including 8 teachers at a boarding school. Schools, particularly schools that teach Nigeria’s national curriculum, are frequent targets of Boko Haram, which can be roughly translated as “western education is sinful.”

In February, members of Boko Haram attacked a boys’ boarding school in troubled Yobe state in northeastern Nigeria and killed at least 59 students. The attackers torched a locked dormitory, then shot students trying to escape through windows.

Additional World Book articles:

• Nigeria 2009 (a Back in Time article)
• Nigeria 2010 (a Back in Time article)
• Nigeria 2011 (a Back in Time article)
• Nigeria 2012 (a Back in Time article)
• Nigeria 2013 (a Back in Time article)

January 2, 2014

Special Iraqi security forces are battling jihadist militants in the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. The militants have reportedly taken over swaths of both cities. Fallujah and Ramadi are in Anbar province, a stronghold for Sunni Muslims that has been especially difficult to control since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The militants are members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is connected to the al-Qa`ida terrorist network. An Iraqi police officer reported to a BBC correspondent today that the militants have seized at least 10 police stations and freed a number of prisoners.

Sunni tribal fighters are reported to have also taken to the streets, many fighting on the side of the government. They also did this at the time of U.S. military surge in Iraq in an attempt to rein in the chaos engulfing the region. (The surge refers to President George W. Bush’s 2007 increase in the number of American troops in Iraq to control sectarian violence and bring Anbar province under control.) The latest violence began last Saturday (Dec. 28, 2013) in Ramadi, when security forces arrested a prominent Sunni member of parliament.

The initial round of sectarian violence in Iraq began in February 2006 with the bombing of the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shi`ite Islam. The bombing, carried out by the Sunni militant group al-Qa`ida in Iraq, triggered a wave of Shi`ite reprisals against Sunnis, followed by Sunni counterattacks. At the height of the violence in 2006 and 2007, the monthly death toll regularly topped 1,000.

Iraqis inspect the ruins of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad. The 2006 bombing of the shrine led to violence between Sunni and Shi`ite Muslims (AP/Wide World).

Tensions between Iraq’s minority Sunnis and majority Shi`ites escalated again in 2012 in the wake of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in December 2011. Yesterday, the United Nations reported that 8,868 people died in sectarian violence in Iraq in 2013. Iraq Body Count, a British-based organization that has tracked violence in Iraq since 2003, recorded 9,475 civilian deaths in 2013 and issued this warning: “If current violence levels continue unabated throughout the coming year, then 2014 threatens to be as deadly as 2004, which saw the two sieges of Fallujah [by U.S. forces in April and November of that year] and Iraq’s [sectarian] insurgency take hold.”

Additional World Book articles:

• The War in Iraq (a special report)
• Iraq 2006 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2007 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2008 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2012 (a Back in Time article)

May 20, 2013

A series of explosions rocked central and southern Iraq today, killing at least 100 people. Multiple bombings at bus stations and markets in primarily Shi’ite neighborhoods in Baghdad left dozens of people dead and many others injured. Bombing attacks were also made in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, and in Samarra, north of Baghdad. In a separate incident in western Anbar province, 10 policemen kidnapped on May 18 were found dead today.

The bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra in 2006 triggered massive violence between Sunni and Shi`ite Muslims in Iraq. The same pattern is emerging in 2013, with Sunni and Shi'ite militants bombing each other's mosques. (© Dia Hamid, AFP/Getty Images)

The surge of sectarian tensions over the last 30 days is the worst violence seen in Iraq in five years. Two bombings apparently targeting Sunnis in Iraqi towns near Baghdad left 37 people dead and dozens of others injured on May 17. That same day, some 30 people were killed when two bombs were detonated outside a Sunni mosque in the city of Baqubah, 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Baghdad. On May 16, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shi’ite mosque in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing 8 people.

Security experts suggest that the latest surge in sectarian violence is being carried out be Sunni Islamist insurgents determined to bring down the Shi’ite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The experts have voiced fears that the country could revert back to the levels of sectarian violence last seen in 2005 through 2007.

Additional World Book articles

• Iraq war
• Islam (divisions of)
• Iraq 2005 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2006 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2007 (a Back in Time article)

April 25, 2013

More than 10,000 people, including many uniformed police and military personnel, attended a campus memorial yesterday for Sean A. Collier, a police officer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology allegedly killed by suspects in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings. One of the speakers at the service was United States Vice President Joe Biden. Three people died when two bombs exploded within seconds of each other near the finish line of the marathon. At least 260 people were injured, some critically. Also on Wednesday, Copley Square, the site of the attacks, was reopened to residents and business people. Boston officials had closed the square and surrounding area while investigators searched for evidence related to the attack.

Nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the bombings, remains hospitalized as he recuperates from wounds suffered in a shootout with police in the early morning hours of April 19.  His brother and fellow suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in the shootout, which followed a wild police case and Collier’s murder. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured in Watertown later that day. On April 22, he was charged by the U. S. attorney’s office for the district of Massachusetts with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction against persons and property, resulting in death.

April 19, 2013

The city of Boston and its suburbs are in a virtual lockdown as hundreds of police officers and federal agents conduct a citywide manhunt. They are looking for one Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who with his brother, Tamerlan, is believed to have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15. Twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed earlier today after leading the police on a wild chase following the fatal shooting of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer. Before killing the campus police officer, the brothers allegedly robbed a 7-Eleven store, critically wounded a transit officer, and carjacked a SUV.  Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has issued a warning that residents of Boston and its neighboring suburbs should “stay indoors, with their doors locked.”

According to Massachusetts state police officers, the two men were Chechen emigres. Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim territory in southern Russia, sought independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Between 1994 and 2009, the Russian government waged two brutal wars against Chechen militants. During that period, Chechen terrorist groups carried out a number of attacks in Russia, most famously the 2004 Moscow subway bombing and the 2004 Beslan school siege that ending with the deaths of more than 380 people, including many children.

Additional World Book articles:

• Russia 1995 (a Back in Time article)
• Russia 1999 (a Back in Time article)
• Russia 2004 (a Back in Time article)
• Russia 2005 (a Back in Time article)

April 17

Two bombs exploded within seconds of each other near the finish line of the Boston Marathon just off Copley Square on April 15. At least three people were killed, including an 8-year-old boy. Some 180 people were injured.

At least one of the bombs, and possibly both, had been packed inside a pressure cooker that had been placed inside a backpack or duffel bag. According to law enforcement officials, pieces of pressure cookers were recovered from the crime scene. Bomb experts note that explosives sealed inside pressure cookers increase the force with which pieces of shrapnel (metal)–such as ball bearings, BB’s, and nails–will explode outward. Physicians who treated the wounded found large amounts of shrapnel embedded in patient’s tissues. They reported that at least 10 of the victims have lost limbs. The use of pressure cookers is a common way to build bombs that are known as improvised explosive devices (IED’s). A number of pressure-cooker bombs were used in a 2006 Mumbai bombing that killed some 200 people.

The attack caused the first-ever halt to the Boston Marathon, which is sponsored by the Boston Athletic Association. The race in 2013 was the 117th running of the marathon.

Additional World Book articles:

• Boston
• India (Back in time-2006) 
• Terrorism

Additional website:

• Boston Athletic Association

February 18, 2013

A wave of car bombings in Shi’ite neighborhoods in and around Baghdad yesterday left 37 people dead and some 125 others wounded. Al-Qa’ida in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and al-Qa’ida and other Sunni extremist groups have ramped up attacks on Shi’ite Muslims as a way of bringing down the Shi’ite-led government. At least 200 Iraqis have been killed in attacks targeting Shi’ites since January.

Iraq’s Sunni minority claims that Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki and his political allies have undermined Sunni politicians to monopolize power. In November, an Iraqi court sentenced Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi to death for the third time on charges that he instigated terrorist attacks on Shi’ite pilgrims. All verdicts were delivered in absentia because Hashemi fled Iraq in 2011 and is living in exile in Turkey. Al-Hashemi claims that his long-time rival Prime Minister Maliki is behind the charges, which he alleges are politically motivated.

On February 15, tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims rallied in several Iraqi cities to protest what they describe as unfair treatment by the Shi’ite-led government. In a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, some 3,000 lawyers recently took to the streets, demanding an end to judicial corruption and prisoner abuse in Iraq’s prisons.

Iraqis pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein after U.S. forces entered Baghdad in 2003. Iraqis had high hopes after the U.S. military deposed Hussein in 2003, but 10 years later, many Iraqis are living in deplorable conditions. (AP/Wide World)

In recent weeks, both Sunni and Shit’te Iraqis alike have begun to openly protest the wretched conditions and bitter sectarian conflict they have endured since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew the Saddam Hussein government. Demonstrators have stormed government buildings in several cities to protest political corruption and shortages of food, electric power, and jobs. The Reuters news agency reported: “. . .  years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq’s infrastructure remains severely damaged. The country suffers a chronic water shortage, electricity supply is intermittent and sewage collects in the streets.”

Additional World Book articles:

• Iraq 2006 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2007 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2010 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq 2011 (a Back in Time article)
• Iraq: a Quest for Political Identity in a Second Year of War (a special report)
• The War in Iraq: the Military Campaign and Aftermath (a special report)
• The war in Iraq: Shifting Alliances on the World Stage (a special report)