dogu-turkistan-sempozyumu

Prof Dru C. Gladney
President of the Pacific Basin Institute, Pomona College
The Role of the International Community in
East Turkestan
All that remained of TYPHOON was four Uighur men living 2,000 miles apart,
on opposite sides of China. A terrorist cell. A time bomb.
Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary lived and worked in Shanghai, but were never
seen together in public. Abdul was married with a son and worked fourteen-hour days
packaging parts for children’s toys at a factory in Putuo district.
Ansary had no girlfriend, no any blood family to speak of. He had a part-time job
as a waiter at a Uighur restaurant on Yishan Lu. Both men, under the guidance and
tutelage of Professor Wang Kaixuan, had been responsible for carrying out low-level
terrorist attacks against Han targets between October 1999 and late 2001. On Wang’s
advice, they had curtailed their actives as TYPHOON disintegrated in 2002. Miles
Coolidge had recruited them back two years later.
The third member of the cell was a twenty-nine-year-old Kazakh named Memet
Almas who had bombed four Beijing taxis in successive weeks in 2000 using explosives
shipped into China by the Macklinson Corporation. In January 2001, to the CIA’s
dismay, Almas was arrested on unrelated charges of petty theft and sent to a Beijing
Second Prison for two years. Under the circumstances, it was the best thing that could
have happened to him. While he languished in jail, nine Uighur radicals, with whom
he would almost certainly have been linked, were arrested and executed by the Chinese
authorities. Upon his release in 2004, Memet met Miles Coolidge during a football match
at the Worker’s Stadium in Beijing and was instructed to move to Xinjiang and await
further instructions. The cell, Miles told him, would perform only one or two large-scale
terrorist attacks in China over the course of the next five years. Those attacks, he said
would draw unprecedented attention to the Uighur cause. Ansary, Abdul and Memet
were all practicing Muslims, but Miles had forbidden them to attend mosque for fear of
drawing the attention of the authorities. They were also ordered to shave off their beards.
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