| 2013 Tiananmen Square car attack | |
|---|---|
| Part of the Xinjiang conflict | |
| Location | Beijing, China |
| Coordinates | 39°54′27″N116°23′50″E / 39.90750°N 116.39722°E |
| Date | 28 October 2013 |
Attack type | Car attack (suspected suicide bombing) [1] |
| Deaths | 5 (including three attackers) [1] |
| Injured | 38 [1] |
| Perpetrators | East Turkestan Islamic Movement |
| Motive | Islamic extremism [2] |
On 28 October 2013, a car ran over pedestrians and crashed in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, in a terrorist suicide attack. [3] Five people died in the incident; three inside the vehicle and two others nearby. [4] [5] Police identified the driver as Usmen Hasan and the two passengers as his wife, Gulkiz Gini, and his mother, Kuwanhan Reyim. [4] An additional 38 people were injured. [4]
Chinese police described it as a "major incident" [3] and as the first terrorist attack in Beijing's recent history. [6] The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or Turkistan Islamic Party, claimed responsibility and warned of future attacks. [2] [7]
A 4×4 vehicle crashed into a crowd and burst into flames near the portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Square. [3] All three people inside the car were killed, as well as two tourists in the square—one Filipino woman and a male Chinese citizen from Guangdong. [4] Thirty-eight people were injured. [3] Witnesses at the scene said that the driver involved in the incident was honking its horn at pedestrians.
Chinese police later issued a notice to Beijing hotels seeking information about two people from China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. [3] The notice described a vehicle and four Xinjiang number plates. [3] They also instructed hotels to be aware of "suspicious" guests. [8]
The police notice also required hotels to report all guests who had registered since 1 October, and the cars they had driven. The request was issued "In order to prevent the suspects and vehicles from committing more crimes". [9]
Five people were later arrested by Chinese police, all being Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim minority group, who hailed from their native Xinjiang, a region in which there is ongoing conflict. [3] One suspect was from the town of Lukun in Shanshan County, the location of an attack in June 2013 in which 30 people were killed. The five suspects were taken into police custody, and said they knew Hasan. [4] Three of the suspects, identified as Huseyin Guxur, Yusup Wherniyas and Yusup Ehmet, were convicted of masterminding the attack, and executed in August 2014. [10]
Top Chinese security official Meng Jianzhu said that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) was behind the attacks, [11] but Uyghur exile groups and some Western observers disputed the claim. [12] On 24 November 2013, the Turkistan Islamic Party, which has since been absorbed by the ETIM, declared it was responsible for the attack. [2]
A BBC camera crew was briefly detained by police after taking footage of the attack. Coverage in the Chinese state media largely downplayed the incident, with only brief reports. [13] Although such associations were made in English-language media, Chinese-language publications did not link the incident to Xinjiang. [8] Chinese internet users also reposted and spread photographs of the incident. [9]
Six days after the attack, General Peng Yong, commander of the Xinjiang Military District, was removed from the Regional Party Standing Committee, the Communist Party governing body in Xinjiang, and replaced by Liu Lei, political commissar of the Xinjiang MD. [12]
Then–United States State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said America supported China's investigation into the matter but declined to call it a terrorist attack and reiterated American support for Uyghur human rights. [11]
East Turkestan or East Turkistan, also called Uyghuristan, is a loosely-defined geographical region in the northwestern part of the People's Republic of China, on the cross roads of East and Central Asia, which varies in meaning by context and usage. The term was coined in the 19th century by Russian Turkologists, including Nikita Bichurin, who intended the name to replace the common Western term for the region, "Chinese Turkestan", which referred to the Tarim Basin in Southern Xinjiang or Xinjiang as a whole during the Qing dynasty. Beginning in the 17th century, Altishahr, which means "Six Cities" in Uyghur, became the Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin. Uyghurs also called the Tarim Basin "Yettishar," which means "Seven Cities," and even "Sekkizshahr", which means "Eight Cities" in Uyghur. Chinese dynasties from the Han dynasty to the Tang dynasty had called an overlapping area the "Western Regions".
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) is a Uyghur Islamic militant organization founded in Pakistan by Hasan Mahsum. Its stated goals are to establish an Islamic state in Xinjiang and Central Asia.
The East Turkestan independence movement is a political movement that seeks the independence of East Turkestan, a large and sparsely-populated region in northwest China, as a nation state for the Uyghur people. The region is currently administered by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Within the movement, there is widespread support for the region to be renamed, since "Xinjiang" is seen by independence activists as a colonial name. "East Turkestan" is the best-known proposed name as it is the historical geographic name of the region and the name of the two independent states that briefly existed in the region in the first half of the 20th century.
The East Turkestan Liberation Organization (ETLO) was a secessionist Uyghur organization that advocated for an independent Uyghur state named East Turkestan in the Western Chinese province known as Xinjiang. The organization was established in Turkey in late 1997 to fight against the Chinese government in Xinjiang, a territory of ethnic Uyghur majority.
Hasan Mahsum, also known as Abu-Muhammad al-Turkestani and Ashan Sumut, was an Uyghur militant who was the leader of the Turkistan Islamic Party, an Islamic extremist group suspected of having ties with Al Qaeda. He was shot dead in a counter-terrorism operation on October 2, 2003 by the Pakistani Army.
The January 2007 Xinjiang raid was carried out on January 5, 2007, by Chinese paramilitary police against a suspected East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) training camp in Akto County in the Pamir plateau.
Terrorism in China refers to the use of terrorism to cause a political or ideological change in the People's Republic of China. The definition of terrorism differs among scholars, between international and national bodies, and across time—there is no internationally legally binding definition. In the cultural setting of China, the term is relatively new and ambiguous.
The 2008 Kashgar attack occurred on the morning of 4 August 2008, in the city of Kashgar in the Western Chinese province of Xinjiang. According to Chinese government sources, it was a terrorist attack perpetrated by two men with suspected ties to the Uyghur separatist movement. The men reportedly drove a truck into a group of jogging police officers, and proceeded to attack them with grenades and machetes, resulting in the death of 16 officers.
The Ghulja, Gulja, or Yining incident was the culmination of the Ghulja protests of 1997, a series of demonstrations in the city of Yining—known as Ghulja in Uyghur—in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China.
The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) is a US funded international organization of exiled Uyghur groups that claims to "represent the collective interest of the Uyghur people" both inside and outside of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. The World Uyghur Congress claims to be a nonviolent and peaceful movement that opposes what it considers to be the Chinese occupation of East Turkestan (Xinjiang) and advocates rejection of totalitarianism, religious intolerance and terrorism as an instrument of policy. It has been called the "largest representative body of Uyghurs around the world" and uses more moderate methods of human rights advocacy to influence the Chinese government within the international community in contrast to more radical Uyghur organizations.
The 2011 Hotan attack was a bomb-and-knife attack that occurred in Hotan, Xinjiang, China on 18 July 2011. According to witnesses, the assailants were a group of 18 young Uyghur men who opposed the local government's campaign against the burqa, which had grown popular among older Hotan women in 2009 but were also used in a series of violent crimes. The men occupied a police station on Nuerbage Street at noon, killing two security guards with knives and bombs and taking eight hostages. The attackers then yelled religious slogans, including ones associated with Jihadism, as they replaced the Chinese flag on top of a police station with another flag, the identity of which is disputed.
The 2011 Kashgar attacks were a series of knife and bomb attacks in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China on July 30 and 31, 2011. On July 30, two Uyghur men hijacked a truck, killed its driver, and drove into a crowd of pedestrians. They got out of the truck and stabbed six people to death and injured 27 others. One of the attackers was killed by the crowd; the other was brought into custody. On July 31, a chain of two explosions started a fire at a downtown restaurant. A group of armed Uyghur men killed two people inside of the restaurant and four people outside, injuring 15 other people. Police shot five suspects dead, detained four, and killed two others who initially escaped arrest.
The Barin uprising was an armed conflict between Uyghur militants and Chinese government forces from 4 to 10 April 1990 in the township of Barin in Xinjiang, China. Violence began on the evening of 4 April, when a group of 200 to 300 Uyghur men attempted to breach the gates of the local government office in a protest against alleged forced abortions of Uyghur women and Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The arrival of 130 armed police to quell the unrest was immediately met with armed resistance by militants among the crowd. Initial clashes that evening left six policemen dead and 13 wounded. The militants also captured five policemen, while the armed police captured 19 militants.
The Xinjiang conflict, also known as the East Turkistan conflict, Uyghur–Chinese conflict or Sino-East Turkistan conflict, is an ethnic geopolitical conflict in what is now China's far-northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, also known as East Turkistan. It is centred around the Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group who constitute a plurality of the region's population.
On 26 June 2013, rioting broke out in Shanshan County, in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, China. 35 people died in the riots, including 22 civilians, two police officers and eleven attackers.
Events in the year 2014 in China.
On the early morning of Wednesday, 30 July 2014, Juma Tahir, the imam of China's largest mosque, the Id Kah Mosque in northwestern Kashgar, was stabbed to death by three young male Uyghur extremists. Religious leaders across denominations condemned the attack.
Abdullah Mansour is a Uyghur militant who was the leader of the Turkistan Islamic Party, an Islamic and Uyghur separatist organization. Between 2008 and 2013 Mansour was an editor of his movements quarterly publication Islamic Turkistan, before rising to its leadership.
In May 2014, the Government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched the "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" in the far west province of Xinjiang. It is an aspect of the Xinjiang conflict, the ongoing struggle by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government to manage the ethnically diverse and tumultuous province. According to critics, the CCP and the Chinese government have used the global "war on terrorism" of the 2000s to frame separatist and ethnic unrest as acts of Islamist terrorism to legitimize its counter-insurgency policies in Xinjiang. Chinese officials have maintained that the campaign is essential for national security purposes.
The Yarkand Massacre was an episode of violence that began on 28 July 2014 in Yarkant County, Kashgar Prefecture of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, and lasted for several days, as Chinese police quelled the local unrest.
