Tamerlan Tsarnaev established links with al Qaeda’s Caucasian networks for terrorist attacks in America, starting with the Boston bombings. In 2011, Russian intelligence notified the ...

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev won the dubious distinction of being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the United States through a route outside the Middle East – the Caucasus. debkafile: The pair were double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the Wahhabi jihadist networks which spread across the Russian Caucasian, with the help of certain Saudi financial institutions. Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went over secretly to the radical Islamist networks.

After a day of lockdown, Bostonians came out cheering when their mayor shouted “We got him!”  A massive police operation in Boston ended Friday night with the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, suspected with his brother of the twin bombing Monday, April 15, at the Boston Marathon, which left three dead and 180 injured and the death of a police in a shootout out at MIT Friday. He was finally hunted down hiding in a boat at a Watertown address and captured injured but conscious and able to answer questions.

Turkish interior minister Moammer Guler identified the suicide bomber who detonated an explosive Friday, Feb. 1 at the US embassy in Ankara, killing a Turkish security guard, as Ecevit Sanli, 31, a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), an outlawed left-wing terrorist group.  He was released from Turkish jail eight months ago. debkafile: The DHKP/C, which is associated with Lebanese terrorist groups and Syrian left-wing factions, was suspected of the attack killing five Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria last July.

At least eight officers were killed in a mysterious twin-car bomb explosion Friday, Jan. 25 at Syrian regional intelligence headquarters in Quneitra on Golan Heights. Some of the fatalities were Syrian, but Western intelligence sources disclosed to debkafile that most were high-ranking Iranian Al Qods Brigades and Hizballah officers. The incident sent tensions shooting up on the Israeli and Jordanian borders with Syria and may delay Bashar Assad’s all-out offensive against Syrian rebels - planned with Iranian aid.

The car bomb which murdered anti-Syrian Lebanese security chief Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hasan and seven others Friday, Oct. 19, in Beirut also dissipated hopes in the West and Israel of the Syrian civil war sundering the Tehran-Damascus-Hizballah axis, or that liquidating Iran’s nuclear scientists and cyber warfare would turn Tehran away from a nuclear bomb.  The Syrian bloodbath grows wider and more malignant and Tehran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon. A reduced joint US-Israel war game begins Sunday.

Bashar Assad kept his cool after losing his closest intimates and senior axe men of his savage campaign against the rebels. He replaced them all in a jiffy and carried on his war without breaking stride.