Turkestan Islamic Party Video Update
Many thanks to commenter Kaiser for alerting us of the video’s presence on Youtube.
The fellow here is indeed speaking Uyghur. We’re taking a close look at his words and we’ll post an update once we get a good handle on what he’s saying.
Furthermore, the Chinese government has responded to the video. Just as one would expect, they are denying the video’s validity. Here’s the story on Xinhua, and here’s the one at the AFP. The Xinhua article clears things up a little by quickly addressing the other two terror attacks claimed in the video: the explosives-laden tractor attack in Wenzhou happened on May 17th, instead of the video’s claim of July 17th, and was carried out by a disgruntled gambler named Hu Baoqiang in an attempt to get revenge on a local gambling den. The Guangzhou Police simply stated that there were no terrorist attacks in the city on July 17th.
[...] The New Dominion is reporting that the video is in Uyghur not Arabic (see the comment below). Their site is also saying the video has been reported by Xinhua and AFP. Possibly related posts: [...]
In your analysis of the speech, can you by the speaker’s accent which part of Xinjiang he may be from?
The English translation that I saw at Global Voices Online has Seyfullah saying he will be “focusing on eight cities that are going to hold Olympic games”
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/07/26/china-unheard-of-turkestan-islamic-party-claims-recent-bombings
However I have pointed out that there are only 7 cities hosting the Olympics and Kunming is not one of them. This error and other reasons lead to my conclusion that the amateur video (and the alleged T.I.P.) has nothing to do with the bus explosions in Kunming.
An-al-y-sis! An-al-y-sis! What’s taking so long?
What’s taking so long? Well, there’s absolutely no context to the video, so there are hardly any analysis to be made, except for Runninglate’s thoughtful suggestion to take a listen to the accent, which we’ll try to do when we can contact someone who has the ear for that. Other than that, what is there to do? Some shady never-before-heard-of intelligence company has a monopoly on the secret of the video’s origins. The most relevant parts have been translated. Big news agencies are blowing it up as a credible threat without any basis, and some blogs in the backwoods are suggesting it’s a PRC conspiracy, which has no basis - there’s no basis for any sort of conclusion, really, because the video appeared in a vacuum. The only thing we can be certain of is that the video was meant to agitate, which is what we concluded in the last post and is exactly what the video is doing. Until more information is released about the video itself (as opposed to the content) there’s nothing solid to be said. So the ball’s in “IntelCenter’s” field, but I think they enjoy the spotlight they’re getting by being the sole authority on a video whose details they are deliberately keeping on the DL.
We’ll look into Seyfullah’s accent.
Does anyone have this video cached?
It is now gone from YouTube.
[...] of the world, this one has slipped under the radar and has not received as much attention as the last video. As such, we have no convenient intelligence agency with summary translations, and so, unless an [...]