Members of China’s Muslim Uighur ethnic minority have gone overseas to fight with the Islamic State group, which controls sections of Syria and Iraq, and returned to take part in plots at home, Chinese officials said.
Officials in of Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, plan to strengthen their crackdown on alleged terrorism, regional representatives said at a talk on the sidelines of China’s National People’s Congress meeting.
Xinjiang has seen repeated violence as Uighurs have bristled under what they say is repressive Chinese government rule. Attacks blamed on Uighurs have also occurred in other parts of China, including a car crash in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Photo: Reuters
“There are Uighurs who have fled overseas and joined the Islamic State,” Chinese Communist Party Secretary in Xinjiang Zhang Chunxian (張春賢) said on Tuesday. “The organization has a huge international influence and Xinjiang cannot keep aloof from it and we have already been affected. We have also found that some who fought returned to Xinjiang to participate in terrorist plots.”
Beijing has previously blamed the violence on Muslim militants with foreign connections who are seeking an independent state in Xinjiang, but has offered little evidence and ignored calls for independent investigations.
Uighur groups say that police officials have used indiscriminate deadly force against people protesting the government’s policies in the region.
The Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the party, in December last year said that about 300 Chinese were fighting in the Mideast alongside the group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
It is possible that people from Xinjiang had fought in Syria and Iraq, said Raffaello Pantucci, a London-based terrorism researcher at Royal United Services Institute defense think tank.
“Whether individuals are able to make the journey all the way back seems difficult, especially given the difficulty people from Xinjiang seem to have in getting passports,” he added.
Pantucci said it was not clear whether the group was letting foreigners leave.
“We have seen numerous reports of foreigner fighters getting executed for trying to leave, including ... Uighurs,” he said.
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