BEIJING: China plans to form an anti-terrorism alliance with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, state media said on Thursday, seeking to boost coordination with its neighbours to tackle ‘a growing domestic militant threat’.
Fang Fenghui, a member of the powerful Central Military Commission which controls China’s armed forces, hosted a meeting with his counterparts on Wednesday in Urumqi, capital of the western Xinjiang region, where officials said that they were battling Islamist militants.
All four countries recognised terrorism and extremism as a serious threat to regional stability, the official Xinhua news agency said, adding that a “four-country mechanism” for intelligence sharing and training would be formed for the purpose.
“All stake-holders reaffirmed cooperation in responding to these forces and safeguarding all the member countries’ peace and stability,” Xinhua said.
Chief of Afghan army General Qadam Shah Shaheem, his Pakistani counterpart General Raheel Sharif with Chief of Tajikistan’s armed forces Major General E A Cobidrzoda took part in the talks, the news agency said.
The meeting comes after China’s defence minister thanked Afghanistan’s Shaheem for support in fighting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) – an Islamist group that China says wants to form a separate state in Xinjiang –not elaborating the help it got.
China has been concerned that Afghanistan’s instability could spill over into the violence-prone Xinjiang region, home to the Muslim Uighur people, where hundreds have died in the recent years’ unrests that Beijing blames on extremists.
The United States and the United Nations have listed ETIM as a terrorist group, though some experts question its cohesiveness and blames Chinese policies in Xinjiang for the unrests.
China denies claims of its policies adding tension in Xinjiang or even motivating Uighurs to join Islamic State group, though acknowledges the few who moved to Syria and Iraq to join the group. Sources in the Taliban told Reuters that a Taliban delegation visited China in July, though the Chinese officials have not confirmed it.
China is also working with Pakistan and the United States to broker peace talks to end a Taliban insurgency that has raged for 15 years in Afghanistan. The effort never got beyond exploratory talks and appeared to break down completely when Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan in May.
