Promoting Jihad Against China: The Turkistani Islamic Party in Arabic Jihadist Media, by Kirk H. Sowell. An Independent Report Commissioned by Sky News, August 1, 2010. (PDF)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Turkistani Islamic Party (TIP) is a jihadist organization which claims to represent China‟s Muslim Uighur population. It is the most militant of Uighur groups in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. While experts dispute TIP‟s origins, it claims to be a renamed continuation of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which appeared defunct in 2003 following the death of its leader.

Since 2008, TIP has used the global jihadist media to present itself as the successor of the classical Islamic caliphate, operating parallel to Osama bin Ladin‟s al-Qaeda (AQ), with its avowed ambition the Islamization of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). While marginal to Uighur society and never demonstrating significant capabilities, Uighur jihadists garnered increased international attention following al-Qaeda‟s 2001 attacks on the United States and TIP‟s own 2008 threat against the Beijing Olympics.

This report, Promoting Jihad Against China, attempts to address two issues: (1) TIP‟s origins, including its relationship to ETIM; and (2) TIP‟s relationship to the global jihadist movement, including al-Qaeda. The evidence is derived from TIP publications in Arabic jihadist media supplemented by secondary sources in English and Arabic.

While this report was commissioned by Sky News, it is an independent study and Sky News is not responsible for its contents. The key judgments are as follows:

- TIP is a successor organization to ETIM, which likely ceased to exist in 2003. While TIP claims total continuity between the two groups, its emergence in 2008 is more likely a refounding of a defunct organization.

- TIP has deep ties to the Taliban, but appears to have only tangential links to al-Qaeda. TIP supports AQ‟s war against the United States, but has criticized it for ignoring Asian Muslims. Media which habitually describe TIP as “al-Qaeda-linked” would be on firmer ground linking it to the Taliban.

- The primary purpose of TIP’s Arabic publications appears to be fundraising, with little relationship to operations. TIP‟s publications feature highly-theoretical discussions of Islamic history and doctrine targeted to Gulf Arabs sympathetic to jihadism. While fundraising is typically a goal of jihadist publications, this seems more true of TIP than for jihadists in the Arab world.

- TIP has failed to break into the mainstream Arabic information environment. While TIP‟s publications have sufficient presence on jihadist forums to give it exposure to its core audience, it has failed to have impact on mainstream Arabic media similar to that of other militant Islamist groups.