By David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew Roth, New York Times, April 21/22, 2013

includes a bunch of stuff about his six-month visit, gleaned from relatives, neighbors and friends from MAKHACHKALA, Russia —

but the following is the excerpt I find most interesting:

....Dagestan may have made him feel more at home than the United States, but it was a strange place to find comfort, given the nearly nonstop violence and the persistent unease it engenders among those who live here.

In the days just before Mr. Tsarnaev visited, a 13-year-old was wounded after picking up a package booby-trapped with a hand grenade, and a traffic police post was fired upon by someone with a grenade launcher.

Two weeks after his arrival, another grenade was tossed in a residential area. It was apparently meant to draw the police into an ambush, because several minutes later, in a pattern eerily similar to the marathon bombing, a larger bomb hidden in a garbage pail went off, killing a small child and injuring another.

And so it went all the time he was in Dagestan: two or three deadly bombings a month on average, constant “special operations” in which the federal police killed dozens of people they said were Muslim insurgents, and numerous other attacks.

After a police operation in early February 2012, the Russian authorities boasted that they had killed the last known suspect in the Moscow subway bombings. Capturing militants alive to put them on trial is not necessarily a priority....