Islamist group claims responsibility for attack on China’s Tiananmen Square
A radical Islamist group has claimed responsibility for an attack on Tiananmen Square last month and warned of future attacks in the Chinese capital, according to an eight-minute audio clip obtained by a US-based internet monitoring organisation.
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) is the first group to claim responsibility for the attack on 28 October, when a four-wheel drive vehicle ploughed through a group of pedestrians near the iconic square in central Beijing, crashed into a stone bridge and caught fire, killing five people and injuring dozens. Chinese authorities quickly identified the driver as Uighur, a Muslim ethnic minority hailing from Xinjiang, a sparsely populated, restive region in the country’s far north-west.
“O Chinese unbelievers, know that you have been fooling East Turkistan for the last sixty years, but now they have awakened,” the organisation’s leader Abdullah Mansour said in the clip, which was posted online this weekend by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), a Bethesda, Maryland-based website which monitors jihadist forums. Uighur separatists call the region East Turkistan.
The Uighur terrorist orgs have had close ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria just to name a few (and if you know the history of Afghanistan, it’s kinda easy to see how US support for anti-communist terrorism is a go-to strategy).
more info on attacks, how the US held Uighurs at Gitmo for over 5 years, etc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkistan_Islamic_Party#Attacks_and_incidents
Americans are used to islamic terrorism being used to justify indiscriminate violence against muslims, so they’re right to be suspicious, and it’s important to notice that China isn’t amplifying examples of terrorism to galvanize the population. on the contrary, events like these are heavily censored to prevent ethnic tension or retribution attacks. In fact, cases like the Urumqi riots and Tianjin Airlines Flight 7554 received more coverage in western press than they did in Chinese media.