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Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

Uighur group claims China bus attacks, threatens Olympics Sat Jul 26, 3:14 AM ET A Uighur separatist group has taken credit for a deadly bus bombing in Shanghai in May and warned of new attacks in China during the Olympics, a group monitoring threats by extremists on the Internet said. In a video statement, Commander Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party claimed credit for several attacks, including the May 5 Shanghai bus bombing which killed three; another Shanghai attack; an attack on police in Wenzhou on July 17 using an explosive-laden tractor; a bombing of a Guangzhou plastic factory on...

Al-Qaeda Draws New Recruits Via Internet Al-Qaeda is using the Internet to recruit vulnerable young people to its terrorist network, according to a programme aired on Saudi Arabian TV late on Tuesday. Umm Osama, the founder of al-Qaeda's first women-only website, al-Khansa, joined several others on the programme to discuss how they renounced jihadist ideology. Among those who sought a response to this question was an imam from the Medina mosque, Saleh Ibn Awad al-Mudamsi, and the father of a young al-Qaeda suspect held in an Iraqi prison. Read More Qaeda Targets U.S. Oil Interests in North Africa U.S....

Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

China: Plot on Olympic athletes foiled 1 hour, 22 minutes ago China said Thursday it had uncovered a criminal ring planning to kidnap athletes and others at the Beijing Olympic Games. Thirty-five members of a ring based in the restive western Xinjiang region were arrested, Ministry of Public Security Spokesman Wu Heping told a news conference. "We face a real terrorist threat," Wu said. The arrests took place between March 26 and April 6, he said. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror hijackings, China has tried to portray the simmering separatist rebellion in Xinjiang as being fueled by terrorist organizations...

Having troops in Iraq or being strong supporters of Israel are the only reasons Islamic terrorists attack people, right? So, how exactly do Democrats and other assorted morons explain this? Wang Lequan, the top Communist Party official in the far western region of Xinjiang, said materials seized in a Jan. 27 raid in the regional capital, Urumqi, suggested the plotters' planned "specifically to sabotage the staging of the Beijing Olympics." …Wang said the group had been trained by and was following the orders of a Uighur separatist group based in Pakistan and Afghanistan called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or...

Petraeus: Al Qaida Trying to 'Come Back In' U.S. military officials said there will be no significant reduction in coalition troops in the Baghdad area as part of an effort to stop the Al Qaida offensive in northern Iraq. They said Al Qaida was trying to reenter Baghdad and reverse its losses in 2007. "Al Qaida is trying to come back in," U.S. military commander Gen. David Petraeus said. "We can feel it and see it, and what we're trying to do is rip out any roots before they can get deeply into the ground." Read More Militants Assert...

via translation - ALERT - China: An attack on the Olympics foiled earlier this year BEIJING - suspected separatists killed earlier this year in Xinjiang, Muslim region of northwestern China, were preparing an attack on the next Olympics in Beijing, said a senior Chinese Sunday quoted by the official media.

BEIJING - Police found links to international terrorist groups during a raid on an alleged terror camp in China's restive western Muslim region last week, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday. Police said they raided a training camp run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, in the mountainous Xinjiang region on Friday, killing 18 suspects and arresting 17 others. "There is a large amount of evidence that shows, including evidence we got from this raid, that the ETIM is associated with international terrorist forces," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao. He also said that the group "planned, organized and...

BEIJING - Chinese police raided an alleged terrorist camp in a western mountain region near the border with Pakistan, killing 18 suspects and arresting 17, a police official said Monday. Song Hongli, director of the general office of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, said the raid occurred Friday at a training camp run by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM. One police officer was killed and another was injured in the shoot-out, Song said. Police are searching for suspects who are believed to have escaped during the raid, Song said, but did not say how many. Police found 22...

China's most-wanted terrorist suspect has been killed in a joint US and Pakistani military operation, according to Chinese state media. The death of Hasan Mahsum, a leader of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) from China's mainly Muslim north-western region of Xinjiang, could not immediately be confirmed and the state media reports were removed from newspaper websites yesterday.However, if true, Mr Mahsum's demise would offer a big boost to Beijing's efforts to link its crackdown on pro-independence activity in Xinjiang to the wider US-led "war on terror".Earlier this month, China had put Mr Mahsum's name at the head of its...

A Muslim man recently identified by China as its top "terrorist" has been shot and killed in an anti-terrorism operation in Pakistan by US and Pakistani forces, official media said. Hasan Mahsum, a former resident of north-western China's Xinjiang region, was killed recently, the Beijing News said, providing no details of the exact time and location of the incident. China last week placed Hasan Mahsum on the top of its first ever list of 11 ethnic Uighur Muslim separatists from the Xinjiang region who it branded as "terrorists". It identified Mahsum, 39, as a leader of the East Turkistan Islamic...

China is stepping up its efforts to convince the outside world that there is a direct link between the US-led war on terror and its own fight against Muslim separatists. But many remain unconvinced by Beijing's latest claims against those accused of carrying out a series of bombings and assassinations in its biggest and most politically restive region. In the past, China revealed as little as possible about the sensitive issue of separatist violence in the huge and remote western region of Xinjiang. Apart from anything else, it was highly embarrassed by the claims of local Muslim Uighurs that they...