Chinese Muslims in Gitmo limbo

Andy Worthington/Huffington Post

The stories of the Uyghurs in Guantánamo -- Muslims from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China, formerly known as East Turkistan -- have long demonstrated chronic injustice on the part of the US authorities to those who know of them, although they have only sporadically registered on the media's radar. Numbering 22 men in total, three were picked up randomly in Afghanistan, another was caught crossing the Pakistani border disguised in a burka, while the other 18 were seized together by opportunistic Pakistani villagers, after fleeing Afghanistan in the wake of the US-led invasion in October 2001, and sold to US forces for a bounty, as was common at the time. A leaflet dropped by US planes offered enterprising villagers and soldiers "millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers."