Abu Yahya al-Libi has called on Uighurs to prepare for a jihad against China. From the Washington Post:
A prominent al Qaeda militant urged Uighurs in Xianjiang to make serious preparations for a holy war against “oppressive” China and called on fellow Muslims to offer support.
Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video posted on an Islamist website on Wednesday, warned China of a fate similar to that of former communist superpower, the Soviet Union, which disintegrated some two decades ago.
“The state of atheism is heading to its fall. It will face what befell the Russian bear (Soviet Union),” he said in the message in which he accused China of committing massacres against Uighurs and seeking to dissolve their identity.
[…] “There is no way to remove injustice and oppression without a true return to their (Uighurs) religion and … serious preparation for jihad in the path of God the Almighty and to carry weapons in the face of those (Chinese) invaders,” he said.
Dan Murphy from the Christian Science Monitor’s Global News Blog questions if the video statement will have any important implications. From his post “Al Qaeda urges Uighur jihad in China. So what?“:
The Uighurs have plenty of grievances. There are roughly eight million of them living under Chinese rule in a region many of them would like to see independent. Anger at the influx of Han Chinese – the country’s dominant ethnic group – into Xinjiang led to bloody riots in June that claimed about 200 lives (mostly Han Chinese) and saw Chinese troops dispatched to the streets of Urumqi, the provincial capital.
But just as Al Qaeda has managed to encourage some bomb attacks but failed rather spectacularly in its broader goal of converting large numbers of Muslims to its zero-sum game/ world-view in places like Indonesia, so Mr. Libi is likely to be disappointed in his efforts to recruit the Uighurs into the global jihad camp. Even the Sunni Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has turned a deaf ear to Libi’s entreaties (Hamas recently crushed a group seeking to create an Al Qaeda style Islamic emirate in Gaza).
While separatist sentiment is undeniably strong amongst Uighurs, it generally takes the form of ethno-nationalism, not a desire to convert the world and unite it under a single, Sunni Muslim caliph. After all Rebiya Kadeer, a key exiled Uighur separatist leader, constantly speaks of the need to save “Uighur civilization,” not Islam.
