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Al-Qaeda, IS set sights on China
A new jihadi magazine published in English by al-Qaeda, al-Sahab ("The Cloud"), says that China is waging a "war by proxy against Muslims" in Xinjiang.The inaugural issue of Resurgence, which focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, describes East Turkistan (the name Islamic Uighur separatists call Xinjiang) as an "occupied Muslim land" to be "recovered [into] the shade of the Islamic Caliphate." An infographic entitled claims that China's government has murdered 4.5 million Turkish Muslims in Xinjiang since 1949, including 120,000 Islamic religious men. It also indicates that Beijing is responsible for burning 30,700 Islamic religious texts – copies of the Koran among them – and has converted 28,000 mosques into bars. The underlying message offers a clear challenge to Beijing. "Historically, East Turkistan has never been a part of China. It is one of the territories colonized by the Han Chinese. It lies beyond the Great Wall, which was built to defend China from invasions, and west of the Jade Gate, which is described by most historical sources as marking the western limits of China. Naming the region Xinjiang/Sinkiang (New Dominion) does not change this historical reality." The article follows directly after another article encouraging Muslims to support jihad in Syria and Iraq. That article, entitled "The Land of the Prophets Awaits You," praises the role Syria has played in jihad against the enemies of Islam and says that "disbelievers of the East and the West" are one and the same. For months now there have been widely circulated reports in Chinese media suggesting that the Islamic State has made plans to seize Xinjiang within five years. IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spoke in July of "Muslim rights [being] forcibly seized in China, India, and Palestine." Posted by: ryuge 2014-10-28 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=402913 |