Chinese Cavalry in Xinjiang
 Militaryphotos.net has some interesting pictures up of the Chinese army taking part in anti-terrorist exercises held recently in Yining, Xinjiang.
From their website:
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese cavalry unit gathers in the suburb of Yining, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Friday, Aug. 25, 2006. Border forces from China and Kazakhstan held an anti-terrorism drill Saturday with armed helicopters and anti-riot vehicles, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The exercise, which involved some 700 border police, included a simulated battle in which Chinese guards were supposed to force a group of terrorists into a narrow valley and cliff caves in Yining, a Chinese city near the Central Asian border with Kazakhstan, Xinhua said. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Li Gang)
Yining is a sensitive area for the Chinese, with Uighur separatists seeing Yining as being a focal point and expression of their hopes and dreams for independence. This next extract from the Jamestown Foundation explains in a bit more the background to the situation in Yining:
Yining: Bastion of Uighur Nationalism
Yining is the heart of the Ili valley which faces towards Kazakhstan and is populated with ethnic minorities. As the birthplace of the short-lived independent republic of Eastern Turkestan proclaimed in 1944, it has maintained a tradition of ethnically-based opposition (referred to as Pan-Turkism in China) to the Chinese presence.
In 1997, a peaceful demonstration turned into a full-scale two-day riot resulting in several casualties among both the police and the protesters. The Yining riots subsequently became a symbol for Uighur nationalism and a warning that the Chinese took extremely seriously with a crackdown on alleged instigators or participants which lasted several years with hundreds of executions and thousands of detentions, as well as dozens of related extraditions from neighboring countries. It was also alleged that “foreign” elements had played a role in the riots, including the aforementioned Pakistani man executed in 1999.
Read the rest of the Xinjiang: An Emerging Narco-Islamist Corridor? (http://www.jamestown.org)
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