Chechnya is one of eight mainly Muslim ethnic republics that sprawl across the northern face of the Caucasus Mountains – which contain some of Europe's highest peaks – between the Black and Caspian Seas. The region is a patchwork of separate nationalities, speaking wildly different tongues, who have a history of intense animosity between each other that's eclipsed only by their historic tensions with Russia.
The approximately 1.2 million Chechens, whose republic occupies about 6,600 square miles in the center of the chain, are a fierce mountain people who speak Noxchi Mott, a language that's incomprehensible to most of their neighbors – but which was one of the three languages, along with Russian and English, that the younger Tsarnaev claimed to speak fluently on his VKontakte page.
