interview<\/a> with The New Yorker magazine, SITE\u2019s founding director Rita Katz \u201cconceded that her group doesn\u2019t check the scientific accuracy of each manual or the legitimacy of every threat.\u201d<\/p>\nNonetheless, Raisman told Al Jazeera he had verified the clip, saying \u201cthe voice matches prior releases from Mansour.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve followed the group for the past several years, looking at its relationship with militant groups in Pakistan,\u201d added Raisman.<\/p>\n
It remains unclear, after several rounds of emails with Raisman, how SITE verified TIP\u2019s online identity.<\/p>\n
Groups like TIP are \u201cso shadowy and nebulous that almost anyone could step in and say they were this group and get support from some crazy organization,\u201d said Dru Gladney, a Xinjiang expert and professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome say they are a creation of the Chinese government,\u201d said Alim Seytoff, spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), referring to TIP.<\/p>\n
Seytoff said the WUC did not have any empirical proof that organizations like TIP were Beijing\u2019s invention. But Gladney said that much of the information we have about these alleged \u201cterrorist\u201d organizations comes from the Chinese government. The videos and audio attributed to TIP are \u201csurprising for Uyghurs,\u201d said Seytoff.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey just want human rights, religious freedoms and democratic rights respected,\u201d added Seytoff. \u201cThat\u2019s why a lot of Uyghurs are suspicious of the organization called TIP, and also their outrageous claims.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seytoff said the clothing, language and banners in TIP videos reveal that members are disconnected culturally and religiously from Uyghurs in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n
Allegations of organized armed groups conducting \u201cterrorist attacks\u201d offer \u201ca convenient narrative,\u201d said Gladney. \u201cIt serves a lot of people\u2019s purposes,\u201d he added. \u201cMany people claim it provides a pretext for China\u2019s repression of Uyghurs.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang in China\u2019s far west is of increasing strategic importance to Beijing, especially amid plans to import natural resources to the area from neighboring energy-rich countries like Kazakhstan. Analysts say Beijing\u2019s repression of Uyghur unrest \u2013 a product of dissatisfaction with the government\u2019s assimilatory and economic development measures there \u2013 is about securing the newly penned business deals in the region.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody denies there\u2019s violence,\u201d said Gladney. But incidents like the Tiananmen crash, which Chinese state media reported was an orchestrated attack by a Uyghur man, were what Gladney believes were isolated, \u201cidiosyncratic\u201d incidents.<\/p>\n
Regardless of the group\u2019s veracity, the WUC\u2019s Seytoff says China will capitalize on the SITE video.<\/p>\n
\u201cGroups like SITE (near) Washington, D.C. say, \u2018look at this organization.\u2019 They have this jihadi message. (SITE) is exactly the kind of group that China wants to point to to justify its heavy-handed repression of Uyghur people,\u201d Seytoff said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An audio recording attributing the fatal crash in China\u2019s Tiananmen Square last month to an ethnic Uyghur \u201cjihadi\u201d organization surfaced this weekend on a website that monitors armed groups. The recording, widely reported by international media, will be used by Beijing to justify its repression of the Muslim minority in the western region of Xinjiang and across the country, according to Uyghur affairs experts and rights activists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":94,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}