Unknown stabs in the heart of China, expert expects more attacks

Ayat Ezz and Islam Muhammad

The official statement issued by the Chinese police on Sunday, October 21, 2018, revealed a knife attack in a public place early morning in the province of Hebei, in the northeast of the country, killing three and wounding a fourth. The statement was a warning of the renewal of the attacks of knives that Chinese cities exposed. The Chinese people recalled a series of sharp attacks that took place in recent years against the backdrop of ethnic conflicts in Xinjiang province.

The police said in a statement that they were looking for the “attacker” and published several pictures of a suspect. The statement said he was a resident of the area. Police attached to its report the pictures of a car they said he used to escape.

The cause of the attacks .. A special vision

For his part, Mokhtar al-Ghobashi, a political analyst and vice president of the Arab Center for Political and Strategic Studies, suggested that the incident in China yesterday was a result of the repression, according to his description, practiced by the Chinese government against Muslim minorities in the country. He told the Reference that these minorities feel neglected and marginalized, and did not find an echo of the need for other countries, and it is also likely to take revenge on the Government of Beijing itself, which is very dangerous to the parties, the government and minorities together.

The political analyst and vice president of the Arab Center for Political and Strategic Studies predicted that in the coming days China will see more similar operations, stressing the possibility of reaching a solution through international sympathy with the Chinese Muslim minority.

In 2014 and 2015, there were several attacks with knives, targeting train stations in a number of cities such as Guangzhou, Kunming and others, and the government quickly attributed them to the Uighurs, against the background of the ethnic tension in the province in the west of the country.

The attacks came a few days after the announcement by Shuhrat Zucker, head of the Xinjiang provincial government, that the security situation had greatly improved, and that there had been no terrorist attacks in the last 21 months as a result of the government’s counterterrorism policy. This, he added, was a result of repressive measures against the Muslim minority, especially after the United Nations called on the Chinese government to end its security campaign against the Uighurs and to seek the fate of up to one million people, most of them held in large camps in Xinjiang.

The recent revelations have provoked widespread international outrage and international condemnations of Chinese government behavior, including restrictions on the performance of Islamic rites in the region, while Beijing justified its actions as “necessary to combat terrorism and uproot it.”