China’s top public security decisionmakers are stunned by a ruinous self-murder bombing attack in Afghanistan last week reportedly carried out by a Uighur Muslim, sources say, provoking Beijing to either disrupt its march toward lesser investments in the Taliban government or to commit further to the quagmire that has stymied other superpowers for decades.
Afghanistan, known as ISIS-K, snappily claimed responsibility for the deadly attack at a Shiite Muslim synagogue in Kunduz on Friday. But in an indeed more brazen-faced and rare move, it also handed a pivotal detail about the bushwhacker, specifying that the bomber was of the race that largely originates from China’s restive Xinjiang Province. Beijing’s attempts to stamp out violent crazies among its Uighur population has surfaced as maybe its utmost sensitive problem at home and hard, as shown through the lengths it’s willing to go to quash the trouble it perceives.
The largely emblematic nature of the rearmost attack has raised new enterprises in China that its mates on the ground in Kabul aren’t following through on pledges they made, including to help associations fighting for Uighur causes from chancing safe haven in Afghanistan. And it has urged worries in Beijing that rudiments of the new ruling government in fact may be trying to exploit its interests there to draw lesser investment and involvement.
“They feel to be in a real state of fear in terms of how to deal with Afghanistan,”says a source briefed on the enterprises by Chinese military officers and on their plans for the future, who like others spoke toU.S. News on the condition of obscurity.
Star concern lies in the growing – though debatable – dubitation in Beijing that the de facto leaders of Afghanistan’s government are actually coordinating with rudiments of ISIS-K, also known as the Islamic State-Khorasan Province. Some world powers, including theU.S., disagreement that claim and conclude intimately that the two groups are rivals. ISIS-K claimed its bombing in Kunduz served in part as retaliation for the Taliban’s amenability to cooperate with China.
Anyhow of the complications, those who follow the situation nearly say the Chinese have good reason to be scarified.
“This is the first major attack since the Taliban preemption,”says Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center.”And it was carried out by a Uighur.”
The news appears particularly ironic for the Chinese Communist Party following its open crusade to subsidize on America’s failed attempts to nation- figure in Afghanistan and its disturbing pullout this summer.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington,D.C. and its Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
At the source of China’s rearmost problem lies the Haqqani Network, sources say, the militant Islamic group with which the Taliban’s traditional leaders have associated themselves and which has in recent times readdressed the intentions and power centers of the entire association. Composed of descendants and cells of Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, a stager of the war against the Soviets, theU.S. government now considers it”the most murderous and sophisticated insurrectionary group”targeting American and kindred forces in the region.
Its current leaders make up the elite cohort in Kabul with whom Chinese officers conduct their most serious business in Afghanistan.