Rising Uighur militancy changes security landscape for China - WaPo

[TomSea]

Rising Uighur militancy changes security landscape for China

BEIJING — They have been praised by the leader of al-Qaida and wooed by the head of the Islamic State group. They have distinguished themselves on battlefields in Syria and are accused of carrying out a devastating bombing in Thailand.

In the past two years, militants belonging to the Uighur ethnic group native to the vast Xinjiang region in western China have shown signs of becoming a force in Islamic extremism globally, a development that is reshaping both the ground war in Syria and Chinese foreign policy.

The predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking people — ethnically distinct from China’s Han majority — have chafed for decades under Beijing’s heavy-handed rule. Uighur separatists belonging to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a militant group based in the rugged tribal areas of nearby Afghanistan and Pakistan and allied with al-Qaeda, have been blamed for attacks in Chinese cities, often using crude but effective weapons such as knives, Molotov cocktails and speeding vehicles.

Read More At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/rising-uighur-militancy-changes-security-landscape-for-china/2016/09/09/8cc09c7e-76fc-11e6-9781-49e591781754_story.html

Islamic militancy even in China.