Color Me Skeptical

So the Chinese police storm a building in Urumqi, shoot dead five Uighurs and wound nine more, and all they find are a bunch of knives? That sure doesn’t sound like al-Qaeda to me. And who really trusts the confessions of minority groups in Chinese prisons, which are notorious torture chambers?

Anyone? Xinjiang has never really been a hotspot of Islamic militancy. Separatism, absolutely, but not ideological jihadi militancy. But the Chinese have certainly tried to cover up their repression with the pretty veneer of “counterterrorism.” Without outside sources on this, I don’t buy it was anything other than another shallow attempt to quash separatism.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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