Security
US Prepares Terrorist Army to Expand its Dirty War on China
The US media has invested in recent years in rehabilitating Uyghur Chinese extremists now based in Syria, depicting them as “freedom fighters” whose ultimate goal is to “liberate” (carve off) territory in western China and are preparing to fight China across Eurasia — adding to an already ongoing dirty war the US has been waging against China over the 20th and 21st centuries.
A Familiar Pattern
It also includes the use of these same terrorists to divide and disrupt unified resistance to invading US forces in Iraq from 2003 onward and the eventual region-wide US reordering of the Arab World spanning Libya and Egypt in North Africa to Yemen and Syria in the Middle East beginning under the likewise US-engineered “Arab Spring” in 2011.
From North Africa to Central Asia, the US has admittedly utilized terrorist organizations listed by the US State Department itself as such to both target nations the US military cannot attack directly and to serve as a pretext for US invasions and occupations in nations the US seeks to attack more directly.
Other episodes in which this US strategy has been employed include against both Russia in its southern Caucasus region and even as far as China in East Asia.
While both Russia and China appear to have successfully neutralized this malicious method of proxy warfare utilized by Washington within their respective borders, the US continues not only arming and building up terrorist forces for future conflicts but is also shaping public perception to depict such use of US-sponsored terrorism as somehow supporting “freedom fighters” against “authoritarian” governments.
US Media Reintroducing Uyghur Terrorists as “Freedom Fighters”
A troubling sign that the US continues seeking to use extremists specifically tailored for attacking China and its investments and projects across Eurasia is a May 2026 National Public Radio (NPR) article titled “The foreign fighters who helped topple Assad — and why China worries about them.”
The article, the latest of many spanning recent years, portrays the largest segment of foreign fighters involved in the US-backed overthrow of Syria in 2024 — Uyghur extremists from China’s western region of Xinjiang — as simply fleeing persecution in China and incidentally ending up aligned with and fighting alongside Al Qaeda*.
The article mentions the previously US State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization (until June 2025), Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS*) Uyghur fighters were recruited as an Al Qaeda* affiliate, which ultimately overran Syrian forces in 2024, toppling the Syrian government.
HTS’ figurehead Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (now referred to as Ahmed al-Sharaa) has even been designated as Syria’s de facto president by the US and its proxies and has even been invited to the White House by current US President Donald Trump despite previously having a 10 million USD reward on his head by the US government itself.
The moral flexibility of the US regarding Al Qaeda* based on whether the US is trying to justify direct military intervention in Syria before the government’s collapse or cement a terrorist-led proxy regime afterward is the central hallmark of the decades-spanning use by Washington of terrorist organizations to target, undermine, topple, then politically capture targeted nations.
It is no coincidence that the US not only recruited thousands of Uyghur extremists to fight alongside HTS* in its proxy war against the Syrian government but now seeks to redeploy this battle-hardened, experienced force of extremists across Eurasia as part of its ongoing dirty war against China.
The NPR article, in regard to thousands of battle-hardened Uyghur extremists, stated:
They say they now hope to preserve their culture and perhaps one day raise an army powerful enough to seize control of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as the Uyghurs call it, the region that the Uyghurs consider their homeland and that the Chinese Communist Party took control of in 1949.
Of course, Xinjiang had been part of China for centuries and only briefly during the 20th century found itself adrift as part of the US-European imposed “century of humiliation” China experienced before its rise in the late 20th and now 21st century — history Washington finds an inconvenience regarding narratives it is building ahead of justifying the next wave of terrorism being prepared across Eurasia and against China itself.
Radicalizing and Ravaging China’s Xinjiang and Beyond
Today, NPR pretends the circumstances surrounding violence in China’s Xinjiang region involving radicalized Uyghurs is ambiguous, claiming it began with student protests demanding the investigation into clashes between Uyghur and Han factory workers. The article only barely touches on the violent nature of Uyghur extremism in Xinjiang (which radiated far beyond the region in subsequent years).
In reality, the Western media has admitted in past years to a concerted campaign of targeted radicalization of China’s Uyghur population in its western Xinjiang region.
The LA Times, in a 2016 article titled,“In China, the rise of Salafism fosters suspicion and division among Muslims,” indicates the radicalization of Uyghurs not only created tensions with the Chinese government and non-Uyghur ethnic groups in Xinjiang, but also among Uyghur Muslims themselves.
The article describes the process as originating from Washington’s close Persian Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia, claiming:
“Saudi preachers and organizations began traveling to China. Some of them bore gifts: training programs for clerics, Korans for distribution, funding for new “Islamic institutes” and mosques.
“This exposure to Saudi discourses actually caused a momentary implosion within the Salafi community in the 1980s,” said Mohammed Al-Sudairi, a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong who spent years researching Salafi Muslims in China.
“The new generation, which was much more engaged and influenced by Saudi Arabia, began to contest the knowledge of the older generation. You had a lot of excommunication within the [Muslim] community; people were saying to each other that they were not real Muslims.””
In other words, despite Washington accusing Beijing of “genocide” in Xinjiang, parathetically meaning “cultural genocide” of what Washington claims is Uyghur culture, it was the US, through its Saudi proxies, erasing indigenous Uyghur culture and overwriting it with imported, politically driven Salafist extremism that demonstrably exploded into armed, widespread violence targeting China’s stability.
While this violence is deliberately omitted from Western narratives today regarding Xinjiang — specifically to amplify the illusion Beijing’s subsequent security measures were arbitrary and unwarranted — at the height of the violence between 2009-2015, the Western media eagerly reported on spiraling violence Beijing seemed unable to control.
The BBC, in a 2014 article titled, “Why is there tension between China and the Uighurs?” documented a long list of extremist-driven terrorism both across Xinjiang and wider China.
The article noted:
“…things really escalated in 2009, with large-scale ethnic rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi. Some 200 people were killed in the unrest, most of them Han Chinese, according to officials.
Security was increased, and many Uighurs were detained as suspects. But violence rumbled on as right groups increasingly pointed to tight control by Beijing.
In June 2012, six Uighurs reportedly tried to hijack a plane from Hotan to Urumqi before they were overpowered by passengers and crew.
There was bloodshed in April 2013 and in June that year; 27 people died in Shanshan County after police opened fire on what state media described as a mob armed with knives attacking local government buildings.”
The article then briefly attempted to suggest the details of the attacks were difficult to verify in an attempt to deny Beijing justification for increased security to deal with the violence; however, most of the attacks described in the BBC article had been captured on security cameras, documenting the undeniable brutality of the radicalized violence.
The article continued:
“At least 31 people were killed and more than 90 suffered injuries in May 2014 when two cars crashed through an Urumqi market and explosives were tossed into the crowd. China called it a “violent terrorist incident”.
It followed a bomb and knife attack at Urumqi’s south railway station in April, which killed three and injured 79 others.
In July, authorities said [attacks were carried out on] government offices in Yarkant, leaving 96 dead. The imam of China’s largest mosque, Jume Tahir, was stabbed to death days later.
In September about 50 died in blasts in Luntai county outside police stations, a market and a shop. Details of both incidents are unclear, and activists have contested some accounts of incidents in state media.
Some violence has also spilled out of Xinjiang. A March stabbing spree in Kunming in Yunnan province that killed 29 people was blamed on Xinjiang separatists, as was an October 2013 incident where a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.”
The extensive but by no means exhaustive list the BBC published of violence carried out by radicalized Uyghurs left a path of death and destruction from Xinjiang to Beijing — with attacks just as likely to kill fellow Uyghurs as they were other ethnic groups and government employees.
The violence eventually radiated beyond China itself with a bomb blast in 2015 targeting central Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, following the Thai government’s refusal of US government demands that Uyghur terror suspects be allowed to travel onward to Turkey to join US-backed terrorist forces fighting in neighboring Syria instead of being sent back to China to face justice.
Chinese security and development policies successfully managed to bring the cycle of radicalization and violence to an end, rehabilitating and deprograming extremists before providing them job training and allowing them to return to society. China also invested heavily in economic development across Xinjiang to drain the pools of poverty and unemployment that had primed the local population for radicalization in the first place.
However, this did not happen before thousands of Uyghur extremists were transplanted by the US from western China to West Asia where they were armed, trained, and battle-hardened in the US-backed overthrow of Syria spanning 2011-2024, where they now await redeployment against both China itself and Chinese-backed investments, infrastructure projects, and diplomatic missions across Eurasia.
Resurrecting and Rebranding Washington’s Anti-China Terror Front
Just as the US has done with other terrorist organizations, including HTS in Syria and the notorious Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) of Iran, the Uyghur terrorist organization, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), previously listed by the US State Department as a foreign terrorist organization, has been “delisted” as of 2020.
The DW in their article, “US removes China-condemned group from terror list,” claims, “China regularly points to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement to justify its crackdown in the Muslim majority Xinjiang. The US removed it from the terror list, saying there’s “no credible evidence” that it still exists.”
The article further explains that, “ETIM was removed from the list because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist,” a State Department spokesperson said, news agency AFP reported.”
Yet, just 2 years earlier — well within “more than a decade”— US Central Command itself admitted to strikes on ETIM terrorists in Afghanistan, which shares a short section of border with neighboring China, exposing the US State Department’s justification for delisting ETIM as a blatant lie.
Just as was the case with HTS and MEK, the Chinese Uyghur terrorist organization ETIM was delisted not because it no longer exists or is no longer engaged in terrorism, but because the US seeks to legitimize that terrorism and more openly aid and abet it.
The US is already waging a dirty war against China across Eurasia, including backing Baluch terrorists in southwest Pakistan and armed militants in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar — both of whom are striking at Chinese-backed infrastructure projects, attacking Chinese investments, and in Pakistan, killing Chinese engineers along with an attempt to kill the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan in 2021.
Uyghur extremists transplanted by the US to topple Syria in West Asia are now openly being prepared by Washington to work their way back east toward China to augment this already ongoing dirty war the US is waging against China, its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), investments, citizens, and diplomatic missions, as well as China’s friends and partners everywhere in between.
Part of these preparations includes the US media itself reinventing previously US-designated terrorists into “freedom fighters” in the hopes of not only building public and political support for Washington’s armed proxies but also depicting China’s inevitable attempts to defend itself against this latest hostility aimed at it as “authoritarianism” and even “aggression.”
Only time will tell if China’s rise and attempts to build up the multipolar world can outpace Washington’s attempts to undermine China and tear the multipolar world down. In the meantime, Washington has readied yet another piece to place upon this global chessboard — one that threatens nations across Eurasia and demands Eurasia-wide security cooperation with China to defend against.
*— terrorist organizations banned in Russia
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
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