CANBERRA, April 27 (Xinhua) -- China is strengthening cooperation with other countries in preventing home-grown terrorists from going to Syria and Afghanistan to join Islamic States (IS) and come back with enhanced terrorist skills, a group of Chinese academics said on Wednesday.
At a seminar held at the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), Xing Guangcheng, director of Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said many terrorists from China, a large part of them from the northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, are testing different routes of going abroad.
One of the route that they took more frequently in recent years are the one, which runs from Xinjiang to China's southern provinces such as Yunnan and Guangdong, to Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, and then through Turkey to Iraq and Syria.
When they are stopped either in China before going abroad or in Southeast Asian countries and are convinced that they would never make it to the Mideast, they would very likely choose to make some desperate gestures and "do something big locally."
Many countries, including China, Vietnam and Thailand, have seen terrorist attacks of this nature in the past few years, Xing said.
China's law enforcement departments have beefed up cooperation with their counterparts in many Southeast Asian countries, which have been aware of the risks of the free flow of the so-called migrating jihadists.
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