If this doesn’t give reason to army/ISI to kill this snake nothing will. Btw, our friendship with China is too important to be derailed by jihadies.
LAHORE: The much trumpeted all-weather Pakistan-China friendship received a major setback following Beijing’s August 1 claim that the Muslim militants from Uighur who were involved in two bomb blasts on July 30 and July 31 in the Kashgar city of Xinjiang province (which killed 18 people) had in fact been trained in explosives in the tribal areas of Pakistan on the Pak-Afghan border belt.
Chinese officials have publicly claimed for the first time in recent years that the attackers were trained in camps being run by the al-Qaeda-linked East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Pakistan, throwing serious question marks over Islamabad’s friendship with Beijing. Though the ETIM network on the Pak-Afghan border has been significantly weakened in recent years in the wake of the deaths of many of its top leaders in American drone attacks, hard-core Uighur militants are still shuttling between China and Pakistan since Xinjiang province shares a border with Pakistan. The Chinese authorities claimed on August 1 that the ringleader of the terror group which carried out the July 2011 attacks in Kashgar had learned making explosives and firearms in ETIM terrorist training camps in the tribal areas of Pakistan on the Pak-Afghan border.
The ETIM, which is run by natives of the Xinjiang province, is fighting against the settlement of Chinese Hans from mainland and describes its struggle as a freedom movement. The tendency of the indigenous people fighting against settlers is not unusual in Xinjiang where more than 200 civilians lost their lives in deadly ethnic violence between the Han and Uighur communities in 2009. Although ethnic strife is not new in Xinjiang, it is China’s accusations directed towards Pakistan that ought to merit concern. The Chinese claim about the involvement of a terrorist group in the recent attacks with training camps in Pakistan was made on the basis of confession by a captured Uighur militant. The Pakistan government, for its part, was quick to extend all possible cooperation to China against the ETIM which is also described as the Turkisatni Islamic Party (TIP).
“Terrorists, extremists and separatists in Xinjiang constitute an evil force,” said an August 1 statement issued by Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry. The statement came after Chinese President Hu Jintao had rung up President Asif Ali Zardari to express concern over the growing terror activities of the ETIM in the Xinjiang province, a month before the holding of international expo in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, from September 1 to 5, 2011. Subsequently, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director-General of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), rushed to Beijing to address the Chinese concerns.
According to well informed intelligence circles in Rawalpindi, the Pakistani military authorities are under mounting pressure from Beijing to allow the setting up of military bases in the tribal areas of Pakistan to counter the Chinese rebels operating from its soil. In fact, the growing strength of the Pakistan-based Chinese separatist movement is a matter of serious concern for Beijing which had even asked Islamabad to allow its military presence either in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) or Fata, just like the Americans, so that Beijing could effectively counter the Chinese separatists there. Yet diplomatic circles added that the Chinese desire to have military presence in the tribal areas of Pakistan should not be painted as an attempt to set up permanent military bases there. “China does not have any military bases outside its land unlike the United States and the prime concern of Beijing is the spread of violence from the Pakistani tribal belt to the trouble-stricken Chinese region of Xinjiang, which is the main Muslim majority province.”
The fact that the ETIM militants had extended their network of terrorist activities to Pakistan became abundantly clear in 2009 when they threatened the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad through a letter, expressing their intentions to kidnap Chinese diplomats and consular officers to highlight their cause. The Chinese mission subsequently informed the Pakistani authorities that some members of the ETIM had already reached Islamabad and are planning to kidnap their staffers from the federal capital. The Pakistani law enforcement agencies consequently arrested 10 ETIM militants and extradited them to China despite apprehensions expressed by the Amnesty International (AI) that they could be at risk of serious human rights violations in there, including unfair trial, torture and execution.
The extradition of the ETIM militants came about as a result of three agreements made between Pakistan and China to curb militancy and extremism. In an ensuing video posted on a militant website on August 1, 2009, Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, the leader of the ETIM, urged Muslims to attack Chinese interests to punish Beijing for what he described as massacres against Uighur Muslims. Haq said: “The Chinese must be targeted both at home and abroad. Their embassies, consulates, centres and gathering places should be targeted. Their men should be killed and captured to seek the release of our brothers who are jailed in Eastern Turkistan.”
Abdul Haq used to run a training camp for his recruits in Tora Bora in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province prior to the US invasion in October 2001. However, he had relocated his camps to Pakistan’s lawless Waziristan region. He had been operating from the South Waziristan tribal agency, also accused China of committing “barbaric massacres” against Muslims in East Turkistan. He spoke with an assault rifle to his right and what appeared to be a pistol pouch strapped to his shoulder. In June 2009, Haq was reported to have attended a high-level meeting in South Waziristan with Baitullah Mahsud, the then chief of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Sirajuddin Haqqani of the Haqqani militant network, and Abu Yahya al-Libbi of al-Qaeda to discuss about Pakistani military operations against the TTP in the area. Baitullah subsequently died following a missile attack by a US drone on the house of his father-in-law which he was visiting in August, 2009.
Almost six months later, Abdul Haq was also killed in yet another US drone strike on February 15, 2010 in Miramshah, North Waziristan while he was travelling in a vehicle. The Chinese separatist commander was closely linked to al-Qaeda and was the second consecutive chief of Turkisatni Islamic Party to be killed in the Pakistani tribal areas. Abdul Haq, also known as Maimaitiming Maimaiti, became the TIP chief after the killing of Hassan Mahsum, the group’s previous head, by the Pakistani security forces in South Waziristan on October 2, 2004. His importance can be gauged from the fact that the US Treasury Department had designated him a global terrorist in April 2009, stating that he has already been appointed a member of al-Qaeda’s Majlis-e-Shura or executive council, way back in 2005. Soon afterwards, the United Nations Security Council had too designated him a terrorist leader.
In fact, the Turkistani Islamic Party or the East Turkistan Islamic Movement pleads the creation of an independent Islamic state of East Turkistan in the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province of China. East Turkistan had maintained a measure of independence until the early 1950s, when Mao’s victorious rebel armies turned to the peripheries and began securing Chinese borders, capturing Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkistan. The native Uighur resisted Chinese occupation until 1960s, but failed to win support from neighbouring Muslim states because of their fractured tribal nature. Since the mid-1980s, however, an active pan-Islamic movement has been trying to cement the opposing groups together against the alleged Chinese occupation of their homeland, pressing for an independent East Turkistan state. Yet Beijing, which views Xingjian as an invaluable asset due to its crucial strategic location near Central Asia and its large oil and gas reserves, has been using all possible means to quell the separatist movement. On the other hand, however, Beijing blames the Uighur separatists for carrying out bombings and shootouts in the Xinjiang province, causing an atmosphere of insecurity and fear in China.