A 25-year-old jihadist terrorist from Xinjiang, an Islamist hotbed region in western China, is the prime suspect behind a massive bombing in Bangkok’s Erawan Shrine on August 17, Thai authorities have said.
China has made a public appeal to the United States for help in controlling radical Islamic movements in the country’s Xinjiang region, saying that the Islamist groups are connected to the global jihadist network that seek to carry out attacks in the West.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is currently in Beijing, where he met with President Xi Jinping on Wednesday and called for the expansion of bilateral trade. While Chinese state media attempted to make trade the center of the meeting, the international community watched for signs of tension between the two nations given Turkey’s support of China’s Uyghur minority.
The Turkish government has upset Chinese diplomats after Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu expressed “deep concern” over efforts in China to eliminate the observation of the holy month of Ramadan and bans in particular on Communist Party members fasting during the day, as is traditional during the holiday.
A combined bomb and knife attack at a security checkpoint in western Xinjiang province has left at least 18 Chinese nationals dead, according to a Radio Free Asia report. The attack in the heavily Muslim-populated region, about which the Chinese government has offered sparse details, may be in retaliation for extreme religious restrictions during the holy month of Ramadan.
As the Muslim holy month of Ramadan arrives this week, Chinese officials are reportedly forcing everyone from Communist Party members to schoolteachers to vow they will not participate in the traditional fast during this month, or exhibit their religion in any way. The ban follows similar restrictions in western Xinjiang province last year.
A Chinese couple has been sentenced to spend years in prison for wearing overtly Islamic fashions in the western Chinese city of Xinjiang. Chinese authorities sentenced the man to six years for sporting a beard and the woman to two years for wearing a burqa.
In Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern province Xinjiang, residents are still recovering from a violent riot five summers ago between the minority Turkic Muslims — the Uighurs — and the majority Han people.
The nation of Kyrgyzstan has escalated its efforts in fighting radical Islam with the arrest of Rashot Kamalov, a popular Imam who law enforcement say has allegedly been attempting to convince Kyrgyz youth to join the jihad in Syria and Iraq with the Islamic State.
Shanghai police have arrested 10 Turkish nationals suspected of aiding terrorists in China’s Xinjiang region by “supplying fake passports.”
The Chinese regional government of Xinjiang, the nation’s westernmost province, has approved a ban on burqas in its capital, Urumqi. The capital is the nation’s most Muslim-populated city; the law would prevent women from wearing the garment in public.
Police in China’s Xinjiang province have shot dead six people who they say were trying to detonate a bomb, local media report.
Chinese state newspaper Xinhua has published an extensive article announcing the “People’s War” on terrorism, vowing “to introduce a counter-terrorism law at national level” and crush terrorists “like rats” for acts such as the Xinjiang railway attack last year.
