Turkestan

During every Ramadan, news erupts in the Turkish press claiming China is oppressing Uighur Turks in the country and banning their practice of Islam. As usual, this was again the case last month. Similar news was broadly covered in the media upon which anti-China demonstrations and attacks took place throughout Turkey. 

Yet are these claims valid? Are Uighurs tyrannized in China? 

Some of the Uighurs deported to China last week from Thailand had planned to go to Syria and Iraq to carry out jihad, state television said, showing pictures of them being bundled out of an aircraft with black hoods over their heads. 

China has no "ethnic problem" in its far west, and Muslim Uighur minorities there enjoy freedom of religion, the Foreign Ministry said on July 6, following anti-China protests in Turkey over Beijing's treatment of the group.

A total of 173 people from the minority Chinese Muslim community of Uighurs have arrived in Turkey from Thailand, where they were being held after fleeing China, a Turkey-based Uighur group said on July 2. 

Prime Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu lives the difficult life of fiction heroes. The tiny Turkish superman is fighting evil in every corner of a world populated by an increasing number of evil men. But the hero will never grow tired of fighting.  

A Chinese restaurant in Istanbul, owned by a Turkish citizen who employed a Uighur cook, was attacked on July 1 by a group protesting China's suppression of Uighur Turks living in East Turkestan.

Leading Turkish civil society organizations have voiced their concerns over the violation of fundamental human rights in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, pledging to take the issue to international organizations and observers.