When China Convinced the U.S. That Uighurs Were Waging Jihad
They arrived at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—where, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it, the “worst of the worst” would be held—a few months after 9/11, directly from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. There were 22 of them, all men, all of them Muslim, bearded, ranging in age from their early 20s to their mid-40s. Five had been captured by American forces following a battle in northern Afghanistan, and the other 17 were seized by police in Pakistan.
But there was something different about these detainees: All were members of China’s Uighur minority, a Turkic group chafing under Beijing’s tight control of their ancestral home in Xinjiang, northwest China. Uighurs had not been known to have harbored anti-American sentiments, much less to have participated in terrorist attacks against Western targets. None of these men, for example, appeared to have fought in any of the past jihadist battlegrounds—not in Afghanistan itself during the Soviet invasion, nor ir Bosnia or Chechnya. And yet, despite the lack of evidence against them, the Bush administration for years resisted legal efforts to free these Uighur prisoners, some of them remaining among “the worst of the worst” for 12 years, until, finally, they were released.
The Uighur community is now in the news again, albeit in a very different way—as victims of what is widely regarded as China's
