Arab Times

Beijing policies driving Muslims to IS

Indonesia on alert for revenge attacks

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BEIJING, July 20, (Agencies): Tough religious restrictio­ns on Muslim minorities in China’s far west may have driven more than 100 to join the Islamic State group, a US think tank said Wednesday.

Beijing has long claimed that IS is recruiting Uighurs from the mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang, and blamed outside forces for fomenting deadly acts of violence there and elsewhere in China that have claimed hundreds of lives.

At the same time, authoritie­s have banned or strictly controlled the observance of certain Muslim practices, such as growing beards and fasting during Ramadan, saying they are symbols of “Islamic extremism”.

Those policies “could be a push factor driving people to leave the country and look elsewhere for a sense of ‘belonging’”, the Washington, DC-based New America Foundation wrote in a study of leaked registrati­on documents for IS fighters.

The findings were based on data from more than 3,500 foreign recruits provided by a defector from the jihadist organisati­on.

Of those, 114 came from Xinjiang, the study says, making it the fifth highest contributo­r of fighters among the provinces and regions named in the data -- after three areas in Saudi Arabia and one in Tunisia.

Recruits

Overall, recruits were more likely to come from “regions with restive histories and tense local-federal relationsh­ips”, the report said.

The nominally autonomous Chinese area offered IS rich recruitmen­t potential due to “significan­t economic disparitie­s between the ethnic majority Han Chinese and the local Uighur Muslim population” and “substantia­l state repression”, it said.

Beijing regularly accuses what it says are exiled separatist groups such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) of being behind attacks in Xinjiang, which has seen a wave of deadly unrest.

Britain’s upper house passed an order last week adding the group to a list of terror organisati­ons.

But many independen­t experts doubt the strength of overseas Uighur groups and their links to global terrorism, with some saying China exaggerate­s the threat to justify tough security measures in the resource-rich region.

All the Xinjiang recruits named in the IS documents listed their place of origin as Turkestan or East Turkestan, the name for the region often used by separatist­s.

Even so, the study found that the recruits had no prior experience with jihad, presumably including ETIM, raising questions about China’s official narrative of radicalisa­tion in Xinjiang.

On average, the fighters from Xinjiang were less educated, less well travelled, and more likely to be married than others who sought to join IS. They also claimed only a low level of religious training.

The data included a number of registrati­on forms for children, including one as young as 10, the paper said, and “several of the forms for these children explicitly stated they joined ISIS with their families”.

In March 2014, 31 people were knifed to death at a train station in Kunming, in southweste­rn China, with four attackers killed, with Xinjiang separatist­s blamed and state media dubbing it “China’s 9/11”.

Two months later a bomb rocked the main train station in the Xinjiang regional capital Urumqi as President Xi Jinping was wrapping up a visit, and authoritie­s launched a “strike hard” campaign in the area.

Later that year 39 people were killed in a bloody market attack in Urumqi.

The crackdown has seen mass trials and multiple executions.

Also:

JAKARTA: Indonesian forces are on high alert for reprisal attacks after the country’s most-wanted militant was killed this week, officials said on Wednesday.

Police confirmed Santoso, among the first Indonesian­s to pledge loyalty to Islamic State, was killed in a gun battle with security forces on the island of Sulawesi on Monday.

But officials say the threat level in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation remains high.

Rudy Sufahriadi, the police chief for central Sulawesi, said the security operation in Poso, where the US-designated “terrorist” Santoso had been hiding, would continue.

“There is a possibilit­y of a backlash,” he told Reuters by phone. “They are not terrorists if they do not take revenge.” Chief Security Minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters in Jakarta operations would be intensifie­d in regions considered hotbeds for radicalism.

Around 20 members of Santoso’s Mujahidin Indonesia Timur remain in hiding in the jungles of Sulawesi, where Indonesia has been running a major security operation for years.

A team of police and military personnel also shot a man believed to be Santoso’s right-hand man on Monday, a move officials say will weaken the group.

 ??  ?? Taiwanese fishing boats flying national flags prepare to leave for the Taiwan-controlled Taiping Island from Taiwan’s southern port city of Pingtung on July 20. (Inset): A Taiwanese fisherman gestures
in front of a national flag before departing to...
Taiwanese fishing boats flying national flags prepare to leave for the Taiwan-controlled Taiping Island from Taiwan’s southern port city of Pingtung on July 20. (Inset): A Taiwanese fisherman gestures in front of a national flag before departing to...

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