MCLC: Han jihadist in Syria

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin Carrico <kjc83 at cornell.edu>
Subject: Han jihadist in Syria
***********************************************************

Source:South China Morning Post (3/31/13):
http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1203482/chinese-jihadist-fighting-sy
ria-web-video-shows

Chinese jihadist fighting in Syria, web video shows

Web video purports to show Han man from China, calling himself Yusef,
who's travelled to war-torn nation to overthrow the Assad regime

The man in camouflage fatigues raised his Kalashnikov rifle and fired
three shots into the air while trudging through a field of purple and
yellow flowers.

He told the person filming him that after reading the works of Sayyid
Qutb, the modern Islamist theorist, he had gone to study in Libya and
witnessed the revolution there. Then he travelled to Syria to help
overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad, which he said "is butchering
every Muslim here in cold blood, including children and women".

He spoke in Putonghua. He called himself Yusef, but a subtitle in English
said his Chinese name was Bo Wang.

On the surface, he appeared to be an extremely rare example of an ethnic
Han Chinese joining a jihadist group in the Arab world.

The video first got the attention of some Chinese last week, when it was
posted on YouTube and then on Youku, a popular video-sharing site in
China. It was quickly deleted from there, possibly by censors. In the
video, the man told the Chinese government to drop its support of Assad or
"all Islamic countries of the world will unite to impose economic
sanctions against the Chinese government".

China and Russia have opposed Western members of the UN Security Council
authorising the use of force to intervene in the increasingly bloody
Syrian civil conflict.

It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video, which was
posted on YouTube on March 17 by a user named ayahm84, and then on Youku
by someone using the handle of "Bashar al-Assad". But two people with
contacts in Syria said they had heard of the Chinese rebel fighter, and
the green landscape in the video closely resembles that of northern Syria.

There have been few, if any, cases of ethnic Han Chinese taking part in a
jihadist movement in recent times. The two most prominent Muslim ethnic
groups in China are the Hui and the Uygurs, who complain of discrimination
by ethnic Han.

"We've of course heard of American and other Western converts fighting
alongside jihadis," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown
University and a former Rand Corporation analyst who studies insurgencies
and terrorism. "I know of no Han Chinese, though. I would imagine that
Chinese officials, given their perennial concern about the spread of
radical Islam into western China, will not be pleased with this
development."

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it did not have immediate comment.

The three-minute video opens with the chanting of an Islamic anthem and
title cards showing white text on black background.

The title screen says in Arabic: "The Mujahedeen Brigade in the Land of
Sham," which is another name for Syria.

More text says the video is a "message to the Chinese people" from the
"media division of the mujahedeen in the land of Sham".

He goes on to speak of 1,400-year-old ties between the Chinese and the
Arabs, stretching back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed and the Tang
dynasty, when the Silk Road thrived. "However," he says, "now the Chinese
government has destroyed that traditional friendship between the Chinese
and Arab people" because Chinese leaders, along with their Iranian and
Russian counterparts, "sell weapons and provide financial assistance to
the Assad government".

There has been some discussion of the video on Chinese-language forums. A
post on one forum called the man in the video "a brain-poisoned youth
blind to right and wrong".