Turkistan Islamic Party
The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP)[note 1] is a Uyghur Islamic extremist organization founded in Pakistan by Hasan Mahsum. Its stated goals are to establish an Islamic state in Xinjiang and Central Asia.[5]
This article is about the Islamist organization. For the secessionist movement, see East Turkestan independence movement. For the Syrian branch of the Islamic Movement, see Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria.Turkistan Islamic Party
- Hasan Mahsum † (1997–2003)
- Abdul Haq al-Turkistani (2003–2010)[1][2]
- Abdul Shakoor al-Turkistani † (2010–2012)
- Abdullah Mansour (2013–2014)[3]
- Abdul Haq al-Turkistani (2014–)
Shura Council
1997–present
An Islamic state in Xinjiang and the entire Central Asia, eventually Caliphate[5]
Idlib Governorate, Syria (largest operation base)
(2014–2016)
1,000 in Afghanistan (2022 UN report)[10]
4,000 in Syria
Al-Qaeda[11]- Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (splinter faction, allied with main faction until 2015)[12]
Afghan Taliban[13]
Free Syrian Army (during Syria involvement, sometimes)- Imam Bukhari Jamaat
- Jamaat Ansarullah
- Nusra Front (2012-2017)
Tahrir al-Sham
Non-state Opponents
Islamic State - Khorasan Province[15]
突厥斯坦伊斯兰党
突厥斯坦伊斯蘭黨
Tūjuésītǎn Yīsīlán Dǎng
Tūjuésītǎn Yīsīlán Dǎng
تۈركىستان ئىسلام پارتىيىسى
Türkistan Islam Partiyisi
Türkistan Islam Partiyisi
түркистан ислам партийиси
The Chinese government asserts that the TIP is synonymous with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). ETIM has been described by scholars as demanding total independence and supporting or being indifferent to more radical methods driven by religious and ethnic motives.[17][18]
Influenced by the success of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the Soviet–Afghan War, the ETIP (later become known as TIP in 2001) was established in September 1997 by Hasan Mahsum in Pakistan. After 11 September 2001, the Chinese regime strove to include its repression of Uyghur opposition within the international dynamic of the struggle against Islamic terrorist networks.[19] Their slogans contained anti-Communist rhetoric and calls for uniting Turks, indicating a movement akin to Islamic pan-Turkism historically congruent with southern Xinjiang rather than pure, radical Salafi jihadism or religious extremism. The revolt lasted several days and was put down by the Chinese government, which deployed significant forces to suppress the insurrection. The Chinese government viewed them as a jihadist movement akin to the mujahideen in Afghanistan across the border which gave birth to more radical movements such as the Party of Allah and the Islamic Movement of East Turkistan.[19]
The Syrian branch of the TIP is active in the Syrian civil war and are largely grouped in Idlib.[20][14]
History[edit]
Earlier groups[edit]
Abdul Hameed, Abdul Azeez Makhdoom and Abdul Hakeem Makhdoom launched the Hizbul Islam Li-Turkestan (Islamic Party of Turkistan or Turkistan Islamic Movement) in 1940. They were killed, imprisoned or driven underground by the China by the late 1950s.[21] After being set free from prison in 1979, Abdul Hakeem Makhdoom instructed Muhammad Amin Jan and other Uyghurs in his version of Islam.[22]
Founding[edit]
The East Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP) was organised in Pakistan by Hasan Mahsum and Abudukadir Yapuquan in September 1997.[23][24][25] In 1998, Mahsum moved the ETIP (which China claims is the ETIM)'s headquarters to Kabul, taking shelter under Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.[26] The leader, Hasan Mahsum, was killed by a Pakistani raid on a suspected Al-Qaeda camp in South Waziristan in 2003, leading to the group's collapse.[27][25]
However, ETIP resurged after the Iraq War inflamed mujaheddin sentiment.[28] The group was mentioned again in 2007, when China announced it raided its militants in Akto County.[29] ETIM received material support from the Taliban and had links to the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek i Taliban Pakistan),[26] prompting China to urge Pakistan to take action against the militants in 2009.[30]
From ETIP to TIP[edit]
The new organization called itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) to reflect its new domain and abandoned usage of the name ETIP, although China still calls it by the name ETIM.[29][31] The Turkistan Islamic Party was originally subordinated to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) but then split off and declared its name as TIP and started making itself known by promoting itself with its Islamic Turkistan magazine and Voice of Islam media in Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Turkish in order to reach out to global jihadists.[32] Control over the Uyghur and Uzbek militants was transferred to the Pakistani Taliban from the Afghan Taliban after 2001, so violence against the militant's countries of origins can no longer restrained by the Afghan Taliban since the Pakistani Taliban does not have a stake in doing so.[33][34]
In 2013, the group announced it was moving fighters to Syria, its profile in China and even Afghanistan and Pakistan has decisively waned since then, while in Syria it has risen.[35]
Al-Qaeda links[edit]
The TIP has links to al-Qaeda and affiliated groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,[36] and the Pakistani Taliban.[37] The US has designated it as having received "training and financial assistance" from al-Qaeda.[38]
University of Virginia associate professor Philip B. K. Potter wrote in 2013 that, even though "throughout the 1990s, Chinese authorities went to great lengths to publicly link organizations active in Xinjiang—particularly the ETIM—to al-Qaeda [...] the best information indicates that before 2001, the relationship included some training and funding but relatively little operational cooperation."[39][38] Meanwhile, specific incidents were downplayed by Chinese authorities as isolated criminal acts.[40][41] However, in 1998 the group's headquarters were moved to Kabul, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, while "China’s ongoing security crackdown in Xinjiang has forced the most militant Uyghur separatists into volatile neighboring countries, such as Pakistan," Potter writes, "where they are forging strategic alliances with, and even leading, jihadist factions affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban."[40]
However, according to the US Treasury, TIP member Abdul Haq al-Turkistani joined al-Qaeda's Majlis-ash-Shura (executive leadership council) in 2005[42] and TIP member Abdul Shakoor Turkistani was appointed military commander of its forces in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.[43] Abdul Haq was considered sufficiently influential by the al-Qaeda leadership that he served as a mediator between rival Taliban factions and played a role in military planning.[44]
In the mid-2010s, TIP's relationship to al-Qaeda was still contested but they became more closely aligned and TIP leader head Abdul Haq confirmed loyalty to al-Qaeda in May 2016.[45] In 2014, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, the al-Qaeda aligned al-Fajr Media Center began to distribute TIP promotional material, placing it in the "jihadist mainstream".[46] The East Turkestan independence movement was endorsed in the serial Islamic Spring's 9th release by Ayman Al-Zawahiri in 2016. Zawahiri confirmed that the Afghanistan war after 9/11 included the participation of Uighurs and that the jihadists like Zarwaqi, Bin Ladin and the Uighur Hasan Mahsum were provided with refuge together in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.[47][48] This was before the Bishkek Chinese Embassy Bombing.[49] The Turkistan Islamic Party slammed and attacked Assad, Russia, NATO, the United States and other western countries in its propaganda outlets such as the Islamic Turkestan magazine and its Telegram channel.[50]
Afghanistan and Waziristan[edit]
In February 2018, airstrikes were conducted by American forces in Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province against training camps belonging to the Taliban and the Turkistan Islamic Party.[51][52][53][54][55] Speaking with Pentagon reporters, US Air Force Maj. Gen. James B. Hecker, commander of NATO Air Command Afghanistan was quoted "The destruction of these training facilities prevents terrorists from planning any acts near the border with China and Tajikistan. The strikes also destroyed stolen Afghan National Army vehicles in the process of being converted to vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices. ETIM enjoys support from the Taliban in the mountains of Badakhshan, so hitting these Taliban training facilities and squeezing the Taliban's support networks degrades ETIM capabilities."[54]
After the 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, TIP was removed from Badakhshan, as the new Afghan government seeks aid from China.[56]
Ideology[edit]
The NEFA Foundation, an American terrorist analyst foundation, translated and released a jihad article from ETIM, whose membership it said consisted primarily of "Uyghur Muslims from Western China." The TIP's primary goal is the independence of East Turkestan.[60] ETIM continues this theme of contrasting "Muslims" and "Chinese", in a six-minute video in 2008, where "Commander Seyfullah" warns Muslims not to bring their children to the 2008 Summer Olympics, and also saying "do not stay on the same bus, on the same train, on the same plane, in the same buildings, or any place the Chinese are".[61]
Since the September 11 attacks, the group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the following countries and international organizations:
Former:
Analysis[edit]
In 2009, Dru C. Gladney, an authority on research on ethnic and cultural nationalism in Asia, said that there was "a credibility gap" about the group since the majority of information on ETIM "was traced back to Chinese sources", and that some believe ETIM to be part of a US-China quid pro quo, where China supported the US-led War on Terror, and "support of the US for the condemnation of ETIM was connected to that support."[133] The Uyghur American Association has publicly doubted the ETIM's existence.[134]
Andrew McGregor, writing for the Jamestown Foundation in 2010, noted that "though there is no question a small group of Uyghur militants fought alongside their Taliban hosts against the Northern Alliance [...] the scores of terrorists Beijing claimed that Bin Laden was sending to China in 2002 never materialized" and that "the TIP’s "strategy" of making loud and alarming threats (attacks on the Olympics, use of biological and chemical weapons, etc.) without any operational follow-up has been enormously effective in promoting China's efforts to characterize Uyghur separatists as terrorists."[135]
On 16 June 2009, US Representative Bill Delahunt convened hearings to examine how organizations were added to the US blacklist in general, and how the ETIM was added in particular.[136] Uyghur expert Sean Roberts testified that the ETIM was new to him, that it wasn't until it was blacklisted that he heard of the group, and claimed that "it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the organization no longer exists at all."[136] The Congressional Research Service reported that the first published mention of the group was in the year 2000, but that China attributed attacks to it that had occurred up to a decade earlier.[136]
Stratfor has noted repeated unexplained attacks on Chinese buses in 2008 have followed a history of ETIM targeting Chinese infrastructure, and noted the group's splintering and subsequent reorganization following the death of Mahsum.[137]
In 2010, intelligence analysts J. Todd Reed and Diana Raschke acknowledge that reporting in China presents obstacles not found in countries where information is not so tightly controlled. However, they found that ETIM's existence and activities could be confirmed independently of Chinese government sources, using information gleaned from ETIM's now-defunct website, reports from human rights groups and academics, and testimony from the Uyghur detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Reed & Raschke also question the information put out by Uyghur expatriates that deny ETIM's existence or impact, as the Uyghurs who leave Xinjiang are those who object most to government policy, are unable to provide first-hand analysis, and have an incentive to exaggerate repression and downplay militancy. They say that ETIM was "obscure but not unknown" before the September 11 attacks, citing "Western, Russian, and Chinese media sources" that have "documented the ETIM's existence for nearly 20 years".[138]
In 2010, Raffaello Pantucci of Jamestown Foundation wrote about the convictions of two men linked to a ETIM cell in Dubai with a plot to attack a shopping mall.[139]
Nick Holdstock, in a 2015 New York Times interview, said that no organization is taking responsibility for attacks in Xinjiang, and that there is not enough proof to blame any organization for the attacks, that most "terrorism" there is "unsubstantiated", and that posting internet videos online is the only thing done by the "vague and shadowy" ETIM.[140]
In 2016, David Volodzko wrote that the Al-Qaeda allied Uyghur Turkistan Islamic Party members were fighting in Syria, and refuted and disproved the claims that Uyghurs were not in Syria made by "The Sydney Morning Herald", the Daily Mail, and Bernstein's article in the New York Review of Books.[141]
Muhanad Hage Ali wrote on Uyghur Turkistan Islamic Party jihadists in Syria for Al Arabiya.[142]
In 2019, Uran Botobekov from ModernDiplomat has written about the Turkistan Islamic Party along with other Central-Asian jihadist groups in a report titled Think like Jihadist: Anatomy of Central Asian Salafi groups.[143][144]