Kyrgyz Chinese Embassy Attacked- How Will Beijing Respond To The Islamist Attack?

A suicide bomb attack on the Chinese embassy in the Kyrgyz capital last week reviled once again the irrefutable connection between China’s Uyghur militants and the global jihad networks including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

While no terror outfit has claimed responsibility for the attack, observers in Beijing have blamed the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) - a Uyghur separatist organisation headquartered in Pakistan’s North Waziristan area. “This is the first car bombing aimed specifically against overseas Chinese diplomatic outposts, and the Turkistan Islamic Party, a branch of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, is highly suspected of carrying out the attack,” Li Wei of the Chinese Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, was quoted by Global Times as saying.

Entrenched in secret mountain bases in Pakistan, the members of the Turkistan Islamic Party have organised attacks on Chinese citizens and diplomats in various parts of the world.  In a similar incident back in 2002, a Chinese diplomat, Wang Jianping, was shot dead in a car by Uyghur separatists.

Xinjiang - the homeland of China’s 10 million Uighurs, just over the border from Kyrgyzstan - is hit by deadly violence. The separatist sentiments in Xinjiang can be traced back to the ethnic clash between the majority Han Chinese and the Uighur Muslim minority- calling for the creation of an independent ‘East Turkestan’ based on their distinct tradition, religion, culture and language.

Researchers usually argue that separatist sentiments among the Uyghur are a result of the Chinese government’s coercive policies of restricting the expression of cultural and religious identity, but the same is not true. This can be explained in terms of the ongoing and serious Islamisation of the region.

TIP leader Abdullah Mansour, from his hideout in Pakistan in March 2014, vowed a holy war against the Chinese, whom he described as an enemy of all Muslims.”The fight against China is our Islamic responsibility and we have to fulfil it,” he said from an undisclosed location.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Jacques Neriah of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs- former Foreign Policy advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin- informed a Chinese delegation of the presence of Uyghur militant training camps in Pakistan and presented material that suggests the number of militants in the camps to be over 1000.

TIP’s apparent link with Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, their association with the Islamic State in 2013, training camps in Pakistan’s Waziristan and the recent surge in Internet-based propaganda activity- all act as determinants in understanding the cause of the separatist movement.

A report published in the Global Times, the hawkish mouthpiece of China’s ruling establishment, simply notes that as “China has become a major power” it is increasingly likely that “China will get dragged into international disputes” and become a target for terror outfits. While the report claims that “terrorism, extremism and separatism” are present in Central Asia, the report completely ignores the link these extremists share with Uyghur Muslim of Xingiang and the Chinese government’s egregious policy of differentiating between good and bad terrorists.

As experience has shown, China takes a passive position in the struggle against global Islamic jihad. Acting with a similar policy, China blocked India’s efforts to ban JeM chief Masood Azhar, apparently at the behest of Islamabad. 

Now that Islamists are going after the Chinese more openly than before, what will Beijing do?