Chinese security officials have issued a list of six men suspected of being members of a militant group that they said used Asian nations as staging grounds for terrorist attacks in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang.
The group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, has claimed responsibility for a series of knifings and explosions that killed at least 18 people last July in Xinjiang, home to ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking and largely Muslim people who make up about 40 percent of the region’s population. The July attacks, in the city of Kashgar, were among several in recent years, apparently mounted by Islamic separatists protesting the heavy-handed rule of Uighurs by China’s Han majority and seeking independence in what they call East Turkestan.
In a posting on its Web site late Thursday, China’s Ministry of Public Security displayed the names and photographs of the six suspects, calling five of them major figures in the East Turkestan group, and it gave accounts of the crimes they are accused of. The ministry said all six had engaged in terrorist activities in Central, West and Southeast Asia as well as in “a certain South Asian country,” a veiled reference to Pakistan. China has repeatedly said that Islamic terrorists who strike in Uighur areas were trained in Pakistan.
Some human rights advocates discount the importance of the East Turkestan group, widely referred to as E.T.I.M., saying that the movement is small and largely ineffective, and that many attacks, which involve crude weapons like knives, do not bear the earmarks of a terrorist organization’s support.
But a more serious picture of the militant group’s significance has been emerging, according to Muhammad Amir Rana, the director the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, based in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. The institute, which receives support and financing from Western research groups, universities and governments, has been profiling radical groups inside Pakistan since 2005, drawing on researchers and public sources.
Mr. Rana said the East Turkestan group was concentrated in North Waziristan, the most turbulent corner of Pakistan’s tribal belt, where its influence among jihadists is so strong that the movement’s leader there, Abdul Shakoor Turkistani, was rumored to be Osama bin Laden’s successor after his death in May. That “indicated that they have a very effective network in these areas,” Mr. Rana said.
Mr. Turkistani has been leading Chinese fighters inside the tribal belt since May 2010, when an American drone killed his predecessor, Abdul Haq al-Turkistani. In May 2011, Al Qaeda announced that Abdul Shakoor Turkistani would be leading its fighters and organizing its training camps in the tribal belt, according to The Long War Journal, a blog that tracks jihadi statements in Pakistan.
Mr. Rana said that in the past year the movement split into two factions. One focuses on the separatist movement inside China, while a separate hard-line faction, now known as the Turkestan Islamic Party, concentrates on global jihad. The Chinese militant fighters are also present in northern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, he said.
China has generally confined its remarks about Pakistan-based terrorism to expressing support for the Pakistani government’s anti-militant efforts. But the authorities in Kashgar, in southern Xinjiang, charged in a statement last August that the leader of at least one of the attacks there in July had trained at an East Turkestan Islamic Movement camp in Pakistan, China’s neighbor and close ally.
The statement said that, while in various Asian regions, the suspects had planned terrorist attacks, trained members, faked passports, bought weapons and posted videos online.
One suspect, Nuermaimaiti Maimaitimin, had claimed responsibility for the Kashgar attacks. About two weeks before that, 18 people died in an attack on a police station in Hotan, another city in Xinjiang.
He was sent to prison in the unnamed South Asian nation in 1999, the ministry stated, but escaped in 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment