Meeting their match

The New York Times has a piece on a terrorist attack in the Muslim area of northwest China that left 16 officers dead and 16 others wounded. The Chinese, predictably, are not amused: "The assault took place at dawn in the oasis city of Kashgar, as a brigade of border patrol officers jogged outside their barracks near the city center. Officials suggested the attackers were associated with a murky separatist movement seeking independence for China’s Uighur minority, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who dominate the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. According to accounts, two men driving a dump truck rammed their vehicle into the jogging soldiers, killing or wounding ten.The attackers jumped out of the truck, stabbing the soldiers with knives, and then lobbed homemade bombs at the barracks, although they exploded outside the compound, Xinhua said. The police arrested the attackers, whom they described as two Uighurs, 28 and 33 years old, but did not release their names. Xinhua said the arm of one man was badly injured when an explosive device detonated in his hand. The police later discovered another ten such devices and what it described as a 'home-made gun' in the dump truck... In recent years, China has waged an increasingly muscular battle against those it describes as radical Muslims. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and China, is blamed for much of the violence in Xinjiang. The attacks, as recounted by the Chinese government, often involve bombings targeting police stations, public buses, factories and oil pipelines... Last month, the authorities executed two men and meted out heavy sentences to 15 others who they said were members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The men were seized during a raid on what officials said was as a terrorist training camp. Also last month, the police raided an apartment in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and shot dead five men who they said were planning a holy war against the region’s ethnic Han population. The official media has publicized other acts in recent months, including what the authorities said was a thwarted attack by three airline passengers who were planning to crash a Beijing-bound plane. The suspects were armed with containers of gasoline, according to Xinhua."

Rico says we need to start waging an 'increasingly muscular battle', before they figure out how to deliver bombs here... (Or have you forgotten IX.XI already?)