Chinese media warn Uighurs against joining Middle East militants

Four were shot while attempting to flee the country. One was arrested for allegedly planning to blow up a shopping mall. Another lost his leg at a squalid training camp overseas.

In recent weeks, Chinese state newspapers and TV broadcasters have issued a series of reports warning its citizens about the dire consequences of leaving the country to join militant groups in the Middle East, underscoring the government’s growing concerns about an exodus of ethnic Uighurs from the northwestern Xinjiang region.

Hundreds of Uighurs, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking group that makes up a plurality in the region, have fled China in recent years. According to state media, “jihadi videos” have influenced many to join militant groups, including the extremist splinter group Islamic State.

Yet analysts and human rights groups say that many of the Uighurs leaving China may be trying to escape systemic oppression at home. The Chinese government maintains draconian religious, political, and cultural constraints in Xinjiang, including constant surveillance, as well as bans on traditional Islamic dress and, for some groups, fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The authorities are “using television to incite the Chinese people to antagonize the Uighurs because their own policies have led to the reality of people fleeing,” Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the exiled World Uyghur Congress, told Reuters news service.

Beijing denies any repression in the region.

Xinjiang has been racked by violent clashes over the last year — often attacks on police and bombings in public spaces — and authorities have countered with a “strike-hard” campaign, ratcheting up their already-tight controls. China has “busted” 181 terror groups over the last year, the official New China News Service reported in May, adding that police have cracked down on videos “propagating terrorism.”

Yang Shu, a counterterrorism expert at Lanzhou University, said that the number of Uighurs fleeing China rose last year after an Islamic State propaganda video called Xinjiang a new frontier in its self-declared caliphate.

The recent string of reports “is the Chinese government using its own propaganda to counter ISIS’ effort to get people to join them,” he said, using one common acronym for Islamic State.

On Monday, CCTV reported that police in the northeastern city Shijiazhuang arrested a man, referred to as Akbar, for allegedly planning to blow up a shopping mall. Akbar left the country in 2013, it said, after a religious leader named “Ali” told him that he would go to heaven if he died while waging jihad.

On Saturday, the broadcaster reported that police in the southern province of Yunnan, which borders Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar, shot to death four people for attempting to illegally cross the border. They also stopped more than 550 people from “attempting to flee the country” over the last year and a half, according to the report.

Last week, police in Shenyang, the capital of northeastern China’s Liaoning province, announced that they killed during a raid three “Xinjiang terrorists” who were “wearing headgear, holding long knives and shouting ‘holy war’ slogans.” They arrested 16 others, according to a statement by the Liaoning government that was republished widely in state media.

The state broadcaster CCTV released a documentary in early June about Uighurs who had fled China to join a terrorist training camp overseas. The half-hour documentary featured interviews with three Uighurs — two men and one woman — who described squalid conditions and houses that flooded when it rained. One found work as a chef for a high-level terrorist “commander,” according to the broadcast. Another, an assistant to a local propagandist, lost his right leg at the camp.

The video did not clarify the camp’s location, how the Uighurs traveled there, and how or why they reentered China.

Uighurs are increasingly fleeing China through Southeast Asia with the goal of reaching Turkey, according to analysts and state media reports.

Earlier this month, Thailand deported 109 Uighurs to China; state media claimed that they aspired to become militants in Syria or Iraq. Rights groups say that they likely face persecution, even torture at home. The U.N. refugee agency called the move “a flagrant violation of international law.”

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