"problems in communist china's far west"................from aljazeera.........
"Chinese media, following the official spin by the government of Kashgar City, has blamed a group of "religious extremists" led by "militants trained in overseas terrorist camps" for last weekend's latest conflagration in Xinjiang, which left six dead and 15 wounded.
The "terrorist group" is the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which emerged in the mid-1980s, widely considered in China as the most dangerous of the East Turkestan "separatist" groups. The official story is that militants "set fire to a restaurant" and then, wielding sickles and knives, started "killing civilians at random".
Geopolitical ramifications may be dire. As ETIM is based in the porous AfPak tribal areas, this amounts to China directly accusing Pakistan of harboring them. Beijing, as well as the UN, consider ETIM to be a terrorist organisation. Yet as the tribal areas largely escape Islamabad's rule, even the ISI is not keeping tabs on how many Uyghurs are embedded in Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda networks.
What's raising eyebrows is that Beijing, which Pakistani Prime Minister Yousef Gillani describes as "Pakistan's best friend" and is unanimously viewed by the Islamabad establishment as an "all-weather friend", has condoned the Kashgar City accusation only one day after ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha was in China discussing exactly the Uyghur situation.
Moreover, China now joins India and Afghanistan in forcefully protesting against hardcore separatist or jihadist outfits based in Pakistan. The last thing embattled Islamabad needs at the moment is Beijing suspecting that it harbors and protects "terrorists"............READ MORE
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