When 20-year-old Khamzat Azimov went on a deadly stabbing spree in Paris this month, a May 12 attack claimed by the Islamic State (IS) extremist group, details about his upbringing caught the attention of psychoanalyst and counterterrorism expert Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin.
Considering Azimov’s infancy in war-torn Chechnya, and the fact that he continued to live with his mother in a one-room Paris apartment until he was shot dead by police in the midst of his attack, Kobrin saw a pattern reflected in other Islamist terrorists she has studied and written about.
They include Chechen Islamist separatist leader Shamil Basayev, Jordanian-born Al-Qaeda militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, also of Chechen descent.
In a nutshell, Kobrin said all appear to have had relationship issues with their mothers that stemmed from being infants in what anthropologists describe as “shame-honor cultures.”
Read more at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
