NewsTracker Answers for week of Apr 22, 2013

Q: Authorities identified brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the suspected bombers at the Boston Marathon. Their family has roots in Chechnya which is located in the section of Russia between the Black and Caspian Seas. Can you find this area on the map?

Circle the area on this map

Q: Chechnya is in a region of Eurasia that includes the countries of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as parts of Russia, Turkey and Iran. What is this region called?

A. The Baltic

B. Belarus

C. The Caucasus

D. Siberia

C. The Caucasus is home to the Caucasus Mountains which along with the Ural Mountains form a border between the traditional continents of Europe and Asia.

Q: While Russian troops and Chechen rebels fought two brutal wars in the 1990s, the Tsarnaev family found refuge with ethnic Chechens in Kyrgyzstan in a region known as . . .

A. Central Asia

B. Far East

C. Subcontinent

D. Near East

A. Central Asia stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. The nations of Central Asia were part of the former Soviet Union, which forced thousands of Chechens to move to Kyrgyzstan during World War II.

Q: The Tsarnaev brothers reportedly identified with the cause of the Chechen separatists who want independence from Russia, where the predominant religion is Russian Orthodox. What is the top religion in Chechnya?

A. Atheism

B. Buddhism

C. Catholicism

D. Islam

D. Chechens are overwhelmingly adherents to Sunni Islam. Chechnya is the largest of several separatist conflicts in the Caucasus, which has a long history of religious and ethnic conflict as Muslim and Christian forces battled to control the region.

Q: Islamist Chechen rebels have been blamed for a wave of terrorist attacks in Russia that killed hundreds, many of them schoolchildren. Chechens also reportedly fought on the side of the Taliban in . . .

A. Kosovo

B. Afghanistan

C. Iraq

D. Yemen

B. The Taliban is a Islamic fundamentalist political movement that controlled Afghanistan and provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda when the group launched the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001. They were driven from power in an American-led invasion after 9/11, but Taliban forces are still fighting U.S. troops for control of Afghanistan.