Iraqis Identify Prisoner as Chinese Islamist Fighter
Eduard Wong
New York Times
September 4, 2014
BEIJING — The Iraqi Defense Ministry has posted on its Facebook page photographs that it says show a captured Chinese man who was fighting on behalf of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni jihadist group.
Iraqi officials have not released further details, but the photographs, if confirmed, would be the first visual evidence of a Chinese citizen fighting with ISIS, which has members from around the world, including the United States. Both the leader of ISIS and a Chinese diplomat said this summer that Chinese fighters had joined ISIS.
The first of the Defense Ministry’s photographs, posted on Monday, shows an Iraqi soldier holding up a muscular, Asian-looking man with a severely bruised and bloodied face. The man is wearing an olive-green camouflage T-shirt, pants, black gloves and an armband with white Arabic lettering on a black background.
A second photograph shows the man curled on rocks on the ground, with cuts and scrapes visible on his stomach and left elbow.
Arabic text accompanying the photographs says “Chinese Da’ash,” using what is roughly an Arabic acronym for ISIS, which prefers to call itself the Islamic State.
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As of Thursday afternoon, the pictures had been shared more than 1,200 times and “liked” more than 9,500 times. The Iraqi Defense Ministry did not say what evidence it had that the fighter was Chinese.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.
Chinese officials have in the past expressed concerns about citizens’ venturing abroad to join ISIS or other jihadist groups in the Middle East, or of their being influenced by such groups to carry out attacks within China.
Wu Sike, who until Wednesday was China’s special envoy to the Middle East, said at a news conference in late July that about 100 Chinese fighters were being trained or were fighting in the Middle East. Mr. Wu said that number was based on reports by foreign news organizations. Most of the fighters were ethnic Uighurs, he said, referring to a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim people who live in Xinjiang, a region in western China.
The Chinese government often says Uighur terrorists are to blame for a surge in violence in Xinjiang, while foreign scholars and terrorism analysts say the government appears to be exaggerating its reports of terrorist activities. Beijing has not released much evidence or details of what it has labeled terrorist cells and operations in the region.
The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, mentioned Chinese fighters in a speech this summer at the start of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. In the nearly 20-minute speech, released online July 1, Mr. Baghdadi listed 12 nationalities of fighters in ISIS, one of them being Chinese, according to a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, an organization in Maryland that tracks jihadist messages.
The recording was the first from Mr. Baghdadi after he had proclaimed himself caliph of the transnational territory of the Islamic State, and in it he encouraged Muslims to engage in jihad. He also called for religious workers, doctors, military experts and others with technical skills to join ISIS.
China was named first in a long list of countries where “Muslims’ rights are forcibly seized.”
There are several reasons jihadists would be hostile to China. Uighurs in Xinjiang have long complained about repressive policies imposed by Beijing. And along with Russia and Iran, China is a prominent ally of the Syrian government, which jihadists are trying to topple.
Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in Britain, said there had been reports of Central Asians, Japanese and Chinese fighting in Syria and Iraq. China is worried about the jihadists’ returning home for the same reasons that Western nations are concerned about returning fighters, he said, but the threat could be lower.
“We don’t know where these Chinese are actually from,” he said. “Given the expectation that most Chinese out there will be of Uighur ethnicity, we don’t know that they have all actually come from China rather than from the large diaspora living in Turkey. If they are Turkey-based, then China would not necessarily be their first port of call to return to.”
“It also seems much harder for anyone to get back from Syria to China without attracting attention or falling afoul of border guards in China or elsewhere, given the difficult journey,” he added.
Last year, a video was posted online that showed a Chinese man whom the producers identified as Bo Wang fighting against the Syrian government. The video, which could not be verified, did not say to which group the fighter belonged. The man, who spoke Mandarin Chinese and called himself Yusef in the video, fired a Kalashnikov rifle in a field of flowers. He called on the Chinese government to drop its support of Bashar al-Assad, the ruler of Syria, or “all Islamic countries of the world will unite to impose economic sanctions against the Chinese government.”
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