A Chinese national of the majority Han ethnic community has turned a Jihadi militant and joined the ranks of the Islamic militants to fight against the Bashar regime in Syria, according to a media report on Sunday.
Bo Wang, who calls himself Yusuf after his conversion to Islam was filmed firing his Kalashnikov rifle in YuTube video, the New York Times reported. He told the person filming him that after reading the works of Sayyid Qutb, the modern Islamist theorist, he had gone to study in libya and witnessed the revolution there.
Then he travelled to Syria to help overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad, which he said “is butchering every Muslim here in cold blood, including children and women”, the report said.
He spoke in Putonghua (a Chinese language). He called himself Yusef, but a subtitle in English on a YuTube said his Chinese name was Bo Wang.
On the surface, he appeared to be an extremely rare example of an ethnic Han Chinese joining a jihadist group in the Arab world, The Times said. The video first got the attention of some Chinese last week, when it was posted on YouTube and then on Youku, a popular
video-sharing site in China.
It was quickly deleted from there, possibly by censors. In the video, the man told the Chinese Government to drop its support of Assad or “all Islamic countries of the world will unite to impose economic sanctions against the Chinese Government”.
The title screen says in Arabic: “The Mujahedeen Brigade in the land of Sham,” which is another name for Syria. More text says the video is a “message to the Chinese people” from the “media division of the mujahedeen in the land of Sham”.