The New Dominion

Just a quick post - BBC’s got a story about a gun battle that occured Thursday between seven “militants” and police in Jiashi County (伽师县), or in Uyghur, Peyziwat County, near Kashgar. BBC’s stories are based on “reports from the scene” rather than the usual release Xinhua News Network, which is interesting as I believe it represents the first time a description of the attack went directly to a Western media outlet without first going through Xinhua. And as usual, mum’s the word at Xinhua’s Xinjiang Channel until the authorites figure out the best way to break the news and the best way to deal with BBC getting to it first. BBC seems to be just as confused as we are, with the title and the summary noting two police fatalities, and the actual article itself noting first “At least two policeman are in the hospital” then later saying “Between two and six police officers are in the hospital.” We’ll try to keep tabs on this incident as more details come to light. Stay tuned.

As usual, after the numerous attacks that occured in the weeks leading up to the Olympics, it was noted by many that government provided no solid proof of the attacks, resulting in speculation that some or all of the stories coming out of Xinjiang could have been exagerrated of fabricated to play up the terrorist threat and to justify the subsequent crackdown.

Interestingly, buried in the swelling posts on the anticipated post-Olympic crackdown was an AP article covering the same topic yet incredibly also included quite graphic pictures allegedly depicting the aftermath of the attack. While at this day and age a picture can no longer immediately count as evidence, these pictures are quite convincing. I’ll let them speak for themselves:

And there you have it. As can be seen in the second picture, this location is indeed in front of the Yiquan Hotel (see movie in this post), the place where the attack is said to have occurred, and the utter carnage is quite plain. In the second picture we apparently can see the dump truck used during the attack, burrowed into the entrance of the hotel which is now famously tarped over. Where these pictures came from (I’m guessing crime scene photographer or passerby with cellphone), how they became public (leaked), and why AP journalist William Foreman decided to tack them onto an article on a less relevant topic rather than making his own sensational article all about it, these are the questions of the moment.

Update: Xinhua has quickly released an article responding to these allegations. Check it out here. It asserts that the Uyghur pilots in question, Aikebaier Maimaiti and Ailiyiming Niyazi who are 757 captains for China Southern, and the apparently single-named Dulihong, a Xinjiang “General-Use” Airlines pilot, have all flown regularly between the attacks and now, and even quote Maimaiti and Niyazi speaking about their recent routes.

Aikebaier Maimaiti recently completed a two-way international flight between Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, on Tuesday morning. He told Xinhua in a phone interview, “Since August 1, I have flown 36.05 hours on routes between Urumqi and Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xi’an.”

On Wednesday morning, he will fly between Urumqi and Islamabad, Pakistan.

Ailiyiming Niyazi told Xinhua he had flown safely for a total of 17,542 hours. Since Aug. 1, he had worked on routes between Urumqi and Hotan, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Zhengzhou and Changsha.

And so this boils down to which article to believe, but I’m going to say my hunch is that this time the Times Online (and therefore The New Dominion) has been lead astray by one attention seeking anonymous source. Original and likely erroneous post we made on the topic under the break.

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While we’re posting maps, I figured I’d also post for our readers the exact location of the dump truck/knife/homemade explosives attack on the jogging police that occured on August 4th. Thanks to this website I found via Baidu pinpointing the hotel on the thankfully short Seman Road and mostly thanks to the youtube video below filming the attack area that I found via The Shanghaiist, I was able to dorkily find the exact locations of the attacks in Google Maps.  Here it is:

The marker on the left is the Frontier Protection Station that the police were based out of and presumably jogged out of the day of the attack. The marker on the right is placed before the Yiquan Hotel, in front of which the attack occurred.

And here’s the video I saw from the Shanghaiist. Basically, you can watch the video and see the landmark features line-up quite solidly with the location illustrated above - the gated courtyard, the various stores, the apartment building, the long fence with nothing behind it. It’s all there.

So the next time you swing by Kashgar, take a picture. And post a link to it here!

Here are links to BBC, AFP, and CNN reports on the story: according to the most current information, “assailants” leapt from a vehicle at a military checkpoint in Yamanya, about 30 kilometers from Kashgar, and stabbed four security officials, killing 3 and wounding 1. BBC notes that at this point the number of assailants is unclear. However, I’d like to add the observation that all 3 of these agencies are as usual sticking close to the “state report” released by Xinhua, and thus they conspicuously fail to mention the fate of the assailants, opening the possibility that they fled intact from the scene for the crime, which would set this incident aside from the previous two. We’ll keep our antennae up and post updates as soon as we learn about them.

Update: Some interesting on-the-scene reporting by the Times Online reveals that the suspects did indeed escape, and that the victims were neither police nor military, but were rather “neighborhood watch” style locals who were allegedly sleeping in a tent near the checkpoint when the attack occurred at 9:00 AM.

Below is a map indicating the site of the attacks:

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Xinhua’s English-language site is now reporting that eight of the suspected bombers in Sunday morning’s attacks in Kucha (Quchar, 库车) have been shot and killed by security forces. Two more apparently committed suicide by way of explosion, two have been arrested, and three are still at large. Xinhua’s Chinese-language site still seems to have no news of the incident, though Caijing, a news magazine known for being somewhat more outspoken, is following the story more closely. Like the English-language articles, Caijing has eyewitness reports, including suggestions of car bombs, the sound of at least 10-20 bombs, and gunfire. The attacks, according to their information from the Public Security Bureau, occurred around 2:30 AM Beijing time (12:30 AM Xinjiang time). The International Herald Tribune (IHT) has details of the incident that differ somewhat from the Xinhua account.

From the Xinhua article, it seems that Kucha is under lockdown, with businesses shut and security checks everywhere. This sounds a great deal similar to what was said to have happened in Qitai, north of Urumchi, on 25 June: according to rumor, ten soldiers had been killed in a raid on a munitions depot at the headquarters of the 102 Regiment of the People’s Liberation Army, 6 km from Qitai proper. Following this incident, the city’s businesses and institutions were closed or open on a limited basis for several days after, while armed police patrolled the streets at regular intervals, frequently performing identification checks. Although the veracity of this rumor cannot be verified, the circumstances and reaction seem very similar.

The IHT’s report also quotes IntelCenter, which conducted some analysis of the first video released by the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), as saying that that organization is, in fact, the same as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the terrorist group blamed by the PRC for most dissident activity in Xinjiang, the existence of which has not been independently verified. The evidence from IntelCenter as put forth in the article, based primarily on the organizations’ names, seems sketchy. We had a look at the relationship between Xinjiang separatism and radical Islam in Xinjiang at the TIP back in April, when a video of an execution of Chinese workers in Peshawar, Pakistan, distributed in the name of the TIP, was released.