The recent violent attacks in Shanshan, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, were the handiwork of terrorists, which should be condemned by one and all. But some Western media, as they have done before, described the attacks as part of an ethnic conflict. Twenty-four innocent people were killed in Shanshan, of which 16 belonged to my Uygur ethnic group. What happened in Xinjiang was a massacre, not ethnic conflict.

The attacks had nothing to do with Islam, which many terrorists claim to be their religion. Islam teaches people to love their neighbors, but the attackers exhibited no such feeling when they butchered the residents of the town where they had been living for almost five months.

Eastern Turkistan movement organizations have close contacts with foreign terrorist groups and some of their members have been trained outside China. This shows that the attacks in Shanshan were related neither to religion nor to ethnicity.