Militant group says it backs China attacks: video

A militant organisation has backed recent fatal attacks in China and predicted more violence, a video released by a US-based terror monitoring group shows.
The video, purportedly made by the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) and showing the organisation’s leader Abdul Shakoor Damla, was posted to web forums on Tuesday, according to the Washington-based SITE Intelligence Group.
In the video, Damla, his face obscured, claims attacks in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang over the summer were revenge against the Chinese government for “maiming the identity of the Muslims”.
Early in July, more than 20 people were killed in a clash between Uighurs and police in Xinjiang’s Hotan city — violence state media attributed to “terrorists”.
Later in the month, two violent attacks in Kashgar city left 21 people dead, including eight suspects allegedly involved in the incidents. Authorities blamed one of the attacks on militants.
They were the latest in several outbreaks of ethnic violence in Xinjiang in recent years, as the mainly Muslim Uighur minority bridles under what it regards as oppression by the government.
Rohan Gunaratna, head of the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, told AFP that TIP is the parent of the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM), a group China and the United States have placed on terror lists.
“…(We) will fight against the Chinese occupation,” Damla said, according to an English-language transcript of the video.
Beijing has blamed much of the unrest in Xinjiang on the “three forces” of extremism, separatism and terrorism.
China’s foreign ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said Thursday that while he had not seen the video, it showed the need for the international community to fight terrorism 10 years after the September 11 attacks on New York.
“Our principled position is that at present a small handful of terrorist forces with the name of East Turkestan, out of motives of splitting China, are conducting rampant and violent terrorist activities within China’s borders,” Liu said.
“This seriously undermines China’s national stability and regional peace and stability. We hope for international efforts to jointly combat terrorism.”
But some experts doubt that terrorist cells operate in Xinjiang. They say the government has produced little evidence of an organised terrorist threat in Xinjiang, adding the violence stems more from long-standing local resentment.
According to the SITE translation, the video posted online does not include an explicit claim of responsibility for the attacks by TIP.
However Gunaratna said the video “very clearly demonstrates the recent attacks in Xinjiang were by the TIP”.