Beijing, Kunming, Urumqi and Guangzhou: The Changing Landscape of Anti-Chinese Jihadists
By Jacob Zenn
During the roughly six months since China suffered its
first-ever car bombing in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on October 31,
2013, China has witnessed a series of other terrorist attacks on its
territory. Such attacks included a mass stabbing at a train station in
Kunming that killed 29 people, a double suicide bombing at a train
station in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’s capital of Urumqi and
a mass stabbing at a train station in Guangzhou that injured six
people. The car bombings in Urumqi on May 22 made it all the more clear
that the recent attacks in China are part of coordinated militant
campaign against China, which is likely organized from outside China and
that employs the tactics of jihadists in neighboring Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
One connection between these recent incidents is that they were
carried out by Uighurs, members of a Muslim ethnic group from Xinjiang.
Xi Jinping and his counter-terrorism strategists are faced with the
task of identifying the foreign and domestic forces behind these
attacks—and around 15 other mass-stabbings and car-rammings in Xinjiang
since 2011—and developing a program to counter such violence. The
internal network of such militant cells is likely already in place and
possibly expanding, which will provide more opportunities for the
Uighur-led Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) and its closely allied Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) to expand their jihad across the border
from Afghanistan and Pakistan into China.
Reflections from news and commentary of the day
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