This Video Doesn't Show Uyghur Armed Men Participating In Military Operation Northeast Syria

A Facebook page called “Manbij Mubashar” has posted last Sunday, November 3, a video showing armed men dressed in military uniform and carrying the flag of Turkey along with the flag of East Turkestan, in which a man is speaking Chinese.

The page has claimed that the video shows “a Chinese faction in the Turkish army declaring jihad (holy war) against the Atheist Kurdish people in Rojava.”

Verify-Sy platform inspected the video, and found that it is old footage that circulated on social media in late 2018, coinciding with Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch against factions in Syria’s Afrin. At the time, activists against the operation accused the Turkish army of recruiting Uyghur soldiers in the attack on Afrin.

Online newspaper Al-Masdar News (AMN) posted the same video in March 2018 in an article titled, “Uyghur militant filmed with Turkish-backed rebels near Afrin.”

Verify-Sy inspected the video and found that a YouTube channel called “Uyghur Television - 2” first published it in March 12, 2018, with a title that reads, “Chinese-Speaking Uyghur Threatens the Communist Party of China;” the video was viewed over 420,000 times. Later, the video was posted under different titles.

News website Fort Russ posted the video in an article titled, “Turkish supported terrorists directly threaten China.”

“It remains to be seen how China will react to this threat by forces who are directly supported by Turkey and are wearing Turkish military uniforms,” Fort Russ reported.

Verify-Sy reached out to journalist Summer Chen from Taiwan FactCheck Center, who provided a full translation of the video, which concludes that the man was not speaking to Kurds but to Chinese President Xi Jinping and the inhabitants of East Turkestan from Chinese origins. The transcript reads, “Chinese bastards. Do you see? You are real bandits. You sick man of East Asia, do you see? You killed millions of our farmers. You killed millions of our children. You killed millions of our women. We will catch all Chinese bandits. We will kill all Chinese people. Listen: Get out of East Turkestan. We warn the Chinese people: Get out from East Turkestan, now. We will come back soon. Allahu Akbar.. Allahu Akbar.”

The Uyghurs are a Turkic largely-muslim ethnic group, mostly concentrated in East Turkestan, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region; “Xinjiang” means “the new borders.”

Human rights organizations accuse the Chinese government of persecuting the Uyghurs and subjecting them to different kinds of oppression, in addition to depriving them of their religious and social rights.