Word: turkic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...territory of deserts and mountains, where peaks of black sand descend toward ancient oasis towns. In many of its cities, men still haggle over livestock in dusty markets and purchase blades from blacksmiths whose families have stayed in the craft for centuries. The faces of its Uighur inhabitants, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group, tell of Xinjiang's history as a crossroads for caravans and civilizations: an astonishing array of gray, hazel and blue eyes, fringed by brown or black or even blond hair. Marco Polo journeyed through these parts and noted, along with generations of other travelers, not just...
...Libi, a Libyan national and al-Qaeda suspected third in command, railed against China's treatment of the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority group in the country's far west who chafe under Beijing's rule. Uighurs complain of government discrimination, from being frozen out of jobs to having their language and religion suppressed. Those grievances and frustrations seemed to boil over this summer, when ethnic riots city of Urumqi left nearly 200 people, mostly Han Chinese, and were answered by a ruthless state crackdown. The Chinese hope, said Libi, "for [the Uighurs'] demise and destruction so that their numbers...
...July 5 young Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic minority that largely practices Islam, rioted in the city, attacking majority Han Chinese. The riot was touched off when police aggressively blocked a protest over the death of two Uighurs during a June factory brawl in the coastal Guangdong province. Two days after the riot, thousands of Han gathered to carry out revenge attacks. Paramilitary forces were able to keep the revenge mobs from Urumqi's Uighur quarter, thus preventing another bloodbath. But some Uighurs were seriously beaten and possibly killed that day. All told, the July violence left nearly 200 dead...
...Baghdad. It was the first ever compendium of the Turkish language, the babble of tongues spoken by nomadic tribes who roamed between the shores of the Caspian Sea and the wastes of Siberia. Despite the scope of his work, Kashgari was proudest of his hometown, boasting that the Turkic dialect there was the "purest" and "most elegant" of them...
...Nearly a millennium later, that language still lingers, spoken by ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority who make up the majority population in the Chinese frontier region of Xinjiang. Kashgar, a city of 3.4 million surrounded by mountains and desert, is at Xinjiang's westernmost tip, closer to Baghdad than to Beijing. And while its history is rich - most agree at least 2,000 years old - many Uighurs in Kashgar see their culture and heritage as under attack by the Chinese government. In the latest move, authorities have started to demolish Kashgar's old town - an atmospheric, mud-brick maze...