Dagestan

WASHINGTON -- President Obama spoke on the phone Friday with President Vladimir Putin of Russia as U.S. officials scrambled to track the movements of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers. In the evening conversation, Obama praised the "close cooperation that the United States has received from Russia on counter-terrorism, including in the wake of the Boston attack," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a written statement. The call came during an intense Boston-area manhunt for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in the bombing, and as a broader investigation spread into whether there may have been collaborators in the U.S. or abroad.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, came to America from central Asia about a decade ago and appeared to have embraced their new life - attending school, holding jobs, playing sports and, in the older brother's case, aspiring to represent the United States as a boxer in the Olympics. But there were signs of discontent from the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. “I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them,” Tamerlan Tsarnaev said, as reported in an online photo essay that shows him training for a boxing competition.

BOSTON - During their decade in the United States, the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings had acquired many of the preoccupations of young American men - cars, sports, social media. But Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, whose family fled Russia's troubled Caucasus region, showed signs of alienation from the country that had embraced them as refugees. "I don't have a single American friend, I don't understand them," Tamerlan said, as reported in an online photo essay that shows him training for a boxing competition that he hoped would lead to a place on the U.S. Olympic team and naturalized citizenship.

MOSCOW -- Reports that two young Chechens were suspects in the deadly explosions this week in Boston were met Friday with anger, denial and surprise by their father and officials from Chechnya and the neighboring Dagestan in southern Russia. Anzor Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen and the father of suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, refused to believe his sons had anything to do with the terror attack. Boston authorities have reported that Tamerlan, 26, was slain in an overnight gun battle with police and Dzhokhar, 19, remains on the run. FULL COVERAGE: Boston Marathon attack “I will never believe my boys could have done such a terrible thing,” he said in a telephone interview from Makhachkala, the capital of the Dagestan region.

When he was a boy in Douala, Cameroon, it is doubtful that Samuel Eto'o Fils could have located Makhachkala, Russia, on a map. Even the most dedicated geography teacher would have had no reason to introduce the youth to the bleak city on the shores of the Caspian Sea. But on Thursday, Samuel Eto'o, as he is more commonly known, will be winging his way north, leaving behind Inter Milan and Italy to join his new soccer club, FC Anzhi Makhachkala....

If current demographic trends continue, within the next half-century Muslims will constitute a sizable part, perhaps even a plurality, of Russia's population; indeed, Moscow currently has more Muslim inhabitants than any other European city. And unlike those in Amsterdam or Paris, most of Moscow's Muslims are citizens, not immigrants ? products of the Russian Empire's 19th century southward expansion. In the coming decades, Muslim peoples from Russia's North Caucasus and Volga regions, together with migrants from neighboring Central Asia and Azerbaijan, will continue to displace Russia's Slavic core and reshape how the country defines itself.

At 15, Israil Mirzakhanov was at a crossroads: He could stay home in the Caucasus region, where several of his friends already had been taken from their homes and had turned up dead in the street. Or he could take his chances with the rampant discrimination in Moscow. Four years later, now a tall and fit-looking college student, he becomes something of a pariah when he steps out on the snowy streets of the capital. He tries not to look people in the eyes because he knows what he'll see. Fear.

A suicide bomber detonated explosives packed into a car outside a busy market in the volatile North Caucasus region Thursday, killing at least 16 people and injuring more than 100, officials said. The blast in Vladikavkaz occurred just before noon, when market activity was at its peak. A slow-moving sedan pulled up near the market's front gate and exploded, overturning cars and kiosks, and shattering windows in nearby houses, said Samir Sabatkoyev, spokesman for the Interior Ministry of Russia's North Ossetia republic.

The last time Patimat Magomedova saw her daughter, she was puttering around the house, manicuring her nails and using henna to dye her hair bright red. It's high time we take care of the garden, the mother remembers Mariyam Sharipova saying that Friday. Let's plant raspberries, cucumbers, greens. And we have to do something about the kitchen, maybe get some pretty new dishes. By evening, the young woman had vanished from the house in this remote mountain village in the Russian republic of Dagestan.

One of the suicide bombers who blew herself up aboard a crowded Moscow subway car this week was a teenager from the restive republic of Dagestan, Russian authorities said Friday. The national counter-terrorism committee released only the name of the teen who set off her charge in Park Kultury Metro station as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, also given as Abdullayeva. But leaks from law enforcement sources filled out the sketch of the 17-year-old's abbreviated, violent life: The girl was the widow of Dagestani militant leader Umalat Magomedov, who was killed by federal troops last year, a source told Interfax news agency.