Paper long abstract:

In recent years, there have been numerous reports about the presence of Uyghurs from China in Syria, mostly fighting for a group called the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) , which is reported to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nursra Front. Allegedly, the Uyghurs in Syria number in the low thousands and include not only fighters, but their wives and children. While there is a long history of Uyghur dissatisfaction and dissent within China, this fighting force in Syria represents the first viable Uyghur militant group inside or outside China since the 1940s. This paper examines the question of how this group came into being, arguing that it is a direct outcome of the Chinese government's framing of Uyghur dissent as terrorism since 2001 and, in particular, of the state's security policies in the wake of the July 2009 ethnic riots in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. In the aftermath of these riots, the Chinese government's already draconian counter-terrorism policies targeting Uyghurs expanded, particularly with regards to more pious Uyghurs and especially in rural regions. As a result, tens of thousands of pious Uyghurs reportedly utilized human trafficking networks to flee China via southeast Asia. It was this migration of already alienated and pious Uyghurs that served as a recruiting ground for TIP, which had previously been a shell organization within Al-Qaeda with no viable fighting force. In this sense, TIP in Syria is a self-fulfilling prophecy of China's counter-terrorism policies, representing the religiously inspired militant movement the Chinese government had long claimed as a security threat, but that had previously not existed.