China may be next in al-Qaeda’s crosshairs

HONG KONG: In mid-November, barely 10 days before the Mumbai terror attacks, Arabic-language news services in Central Asia were abuzz with a sensational announcement: Osama bin Laden, the shadowy al-Qaeda leader, had personally appointed a new leader for the jihadi group in China.

According to these reports, Muhammad Uighuri, a self-proclaimed Qaeda spokesman, said Laden had appointed a Chinese citizen by the name of Abdul Haq Turkistani to head the outfit in China.

Uighuri claimed in these reports that Turkistani was based in Xinjiang province in China’s northwestern region, where ethnic Uighurs are waging a campaign for independence from China.

An Afghan news service claimed, additionally, that Turkistani had been appointed at the head of a group called Hizb-e-Islami Turkistan (Turkistan Islamic Party,
or Tip). Other media reports made contradictory claims that Turkistani was still operating in the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan with a band of Uighur fighters.

These reports suggest the opening up of a new theatre of operations for al-Qaeda in China. “But the legitimacy of these announcements remains uncertain,” says Waliullah Rahmani, executive director, Kabul Centre for Strategic Studies.  

Rahmani, an analyst on the Jamestown Foundation, told DNA on telephone from Kabul that despite “unsubstantiated claims” by China’s security services and the foreign ministry, “there is little proof that al-Qaeda has ever engaged in active operations within China”. 

In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, Tip claimed credit for a series of terrorist attacks in China, including bus explosions in Shanghai and Kunming (in southwest China). In a videotape released at the time, a masked man held out threats of more attacks using chemical and biological weapons during the Olympics, but the sporting extravaganza passed by without major incident.

The structure of Tip and Turkistani’s low profile, together with other factors, renders it difficult to establish the new group’s affiliation with al-Qaeda, said Rahmani. There are, however, indications that Tip is looking to enhance its profile beyond its Uighur identity - in the Arabic-speaking world. Rahmani pointed out that Tip recently launched Turkistan al-Islamia, an Arabic-language publication similar to other jihadi publications.

There are theological differences between the Uighurs, who practise a moderate Sufi version of Islam, and al-Qaeda, which abides by a more orthodox Salafist Wahabi tradition. But Rahmani believes these are not irreconcilable differences. He pointed to other media reports that claimed that when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, some 250 Chinese radical Muslims were operating under Laden’s command in the country’s eastern and northern parts.

Uighuri, in fact, claims that some 300 Uighur separatists affiliated to Tip had undergone arms training in camps in the NWFP and that many had returned to Xinjiang. Whether these militants will surface with a sensational strike in China remains unclear, but Beijing has reason to be concerned about the expansion of al-Qaeda’s circle of influence into its ‘Wild West’.