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| Flag of Turkistan Islamic Party (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Benjamin David Baker
In a bid to please China, Pakistan says it has defeated a major Uyghur militant group within its borders.
Pakistan is known for being a refuge for transnational terrorism. The Taliban has long used the country’s inaccessible border regions as staging points for cross-border strikes into Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden was killed in a compound just outside of Abbottabad.
Pakistani society has been fairly ambivalent about its relationship with Islamic extremist groups. As The Diplomat’s cover issue this month shows, various factions within Pakistan have different feelings about organizations such as the Pakistani Taliban, the Tehrik-i-Taliban.
Two political parties, Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan and Jamiat-e-Ulema Pakistan, have a history of being sympathetic towards violent Islamic groups. Other Pakistani organizations, notably the military under the command of General Raheel Sharif, have tried to stamp out armed Islamic extremist groups in the country.
One such organization is the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM). This group, which is an umbrella organization for numerous extremist groups fighting for the independence of China’s western Xinjiang province, is aligned with al-Qaeda and is responsible for several terror attacks throughout China in the last decade. These include a car bomb attack in Beijing, a police station raid in Lukqun (both in 2013), and. more recently, a deadly attack on a train station in Kunming last year.
Read the full story at The Diplomat