UPDATE: Clarification: There is not yet any official confirmation that the YouTube user posting this video is the same person as Boston suspect.
Tamerlan Tsnarnaev, the 26-year-old Boston bombing suspect who died in a shootout with Boston police and brother of the other Boston bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, posted a religious video on his YouTube page dedicated to a prophecy often cited by Islamic extremists. The video details the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, an end-of-days hadith - a saying attributed to the prophet Muhammed - which claims that an invincible Islamic army will come from non-Arab peoples. Click here to watch the video.
Khurasan is a historical region which refers to a large swath of central Asia, including what is now northeastern and eastern Iran and parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan.
A note in the video, at the 1:40 minute mark, says, "There will be videos of various Muslims, but this is not intended to say these are the people o prophecy, rather it is to give you an image of what they may resemble. There will also be shown hadiths, which majority of the scholars say is authentic and others say is weak. Allah knows best."
The video features grainy imagery of explosions and soldiers preparing for combat, yet there are moments in which it appears, incongruously, to reject violence. A hadith stating that "Allah will rise an army from the non Arabs who will be greater riders and will have better weapons than the Arabs, Allah subahu wa ta alla will support deen (Islam) by them" comes accompanied with a note saying "their weapons will be the weapons of emaan (faith) as another hadith of Saheeh Muslims will tell that they will conquer Constantinople without materialistic weapons".
The brothers hail from Chechnya, a republic in Russia of predominantly Sunni Islamic faith. The republic has a history of strong separatist sentiments and movements both under Soviet and Russian rule, and during the 1990s and 2000s saw ongoing violence between separatists and Russian forces.
Mother Jones cites a book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan entitled "The Black Banners" in which Soufan describes the hadith as a centerpiece of fundamentalist Islamic ideologies, most notably that of Al-Qaeda.
"It's not a coincidence that bin Laden made al-Qaeda's flag black," Soufan writes in the book, "he also regularly cited the hadith and referenced Khurasan when recruiting, motivating, and fund-raising."
The New York Times reports that Tamerlan Tsnarnaev's other favorite YouTube clips included Russian rap videos as well as a video from a young ethnic Russian man titled "How I accepted Islam and became a Shiite," a clip titled "Seven Steps to Successful Prayer."
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