The killing of one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings and the ongoing hunt for another have focused attention on the motivations and background of the suspects themselves. The revelation that the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are of ethnic Chechen origin has led commentators to look to culture and history for clues about the sources of this week’s attack.

This angle is misguided, at least at this stage of the investigation and still-ongoing manhunt. In fact, any “Chechnya angle” to the story is overshadowed by the American one. The Tsarnaevs look much more like other homegrown terrorists—animal-rights extremists, white supremacists, anarchists, and lone-wolf ideologues—than like religious warriors fighting on a faraway and exotic frontier.

First, there is as yet no evidence that the Tsarnaev brothers were part of a network of insurgents connected with Chechnya or other areas of Russia’s North Caucasus region. That area—a land of rugged valleys and plains lying north of the Caucasus mountain range between the Black and Caspian seas—has long been a source of instability and concern for the Russian government.

Russia fought two wars in the 1990s and early 2000s to bring Chechen secessionism under control, and terrorists from the region have been responsible for some of most heinous attacks in recent Russian history, from murdering hundreds of schoolchildren to bombing the Moscow subway. But connecting the Tsarnaevs with this past—at least at this stage—is like wondering about Timothy McVeigh’s Scotch-Irishness: a true but ultimately irrelevant part of the background of the Oklahoma City bomber.

Second, it is unclear whether the Tsarnaev brothers were even from Chechnya itself. Their family ties, at least in the lifetimes of the two brothers themselves, seem to have been stronger to another north Caucasus republic, Dagestan. Typically ethnic Chechens from Dagestan and from Chechnya are very different communities. They often look on one another with mutual suspicion and, apart from some family ties across the two republics, are quite separate cultures. Precisely because of the past wars in Chechnya—which officially came to an end in 2009—the Russian government has done everything possible to keep these communities apart, from massive surveillance to roadblocks for cars moving from one North Caucasus republic to another.

Third, the Tsarnaevs were reportedly naturalized American citizens. The real question at the moment is how they became radicalized, what motivated them to launch the attack in Boston, and whether they are part of any larger conspiracy in the United States or abroad.

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