From China Daily:
The Pakistani military said that 17 militants gunned down near the Afghan border were all from Kazakhstan and included women and teenage youths."We now believe the entire group was from Kazakhstan," military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan told AFP on Monday.
He said the authorities recovered four passports and some documents and identity cards which indicated they were Kazakhs.
Troops hunting militants with suspected links to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban killed the 17 in a clash in the rugged border tribal area on Sunday.
The clash broke out two days after US forces in Afghanistan killed 24 suspected Al-Qaeda militants and their Taliban allies on the Pakistani side of the border.
Pakistani troops acting on a tip-off cordoned off a hideout in an isolated complex outside Miranshah, the main town in the semi-autonomous North Waziristan tribal region.
The 17, including women and teenagers, were killed as they tried to break the siege and flee the compound in two vehicles after a shoot-out, Sultan said. One vehicle was knocked out and the other was crippled.
The general said the group included women and youths aged under 20, who also took part in the fighting.
"These guys were all trained fighters," the general said adding that women and young people received training in explosives.
He said local officials and elders had tried for more than two hours to persuade the group to surrender but a gunbattle erupted when they tried to escape in their vehicles.
The women hurled grenades when security forces stopped them, Sultan said.
Troops recovered arms and ammunition, including detonators, explosives and bomb-making instructions. Sixteen locals who had helped the group were arrested...
Kazakhstan? With the oil boomtown of Atyrau? What does this mean? In Kazakhstan the Muslims are almost entirely, or were almost entirely, of the atheist, "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslim variety. Half the population was Russian, or of various "nationalities" such as Jews, Germans, Koreans, and others, all of them Russian by culture and language, as are the Kazakhs. There are also lots of undocumented Chinese coming over the border, trading goods, and sometimes marrying locally and settling down. Maps in Beijing of the old Chinese Empire show present-day Kazakhstan as part of that empire.
Were I Nazarbayev, or any of the highly intelligent Kazakhs who must deal with this problem (Kazakhstan for the Muslims is a big prize, given the Caspian oil)I would start to emphasize, for the Kazakh part of the population, the pre-Islamic period of Central Asia. Various Khans, and warriors with names like Ablai.
It is true that what was formally the government university a few years ago was renamed "Al-Farabi" after the philosopher who was born in present-day Kazakhstan. That's okay. But all that anti-Islamic propaganda used by the Soviets in the campaigns against the Basmachi should be taken out, re-dusted, put into a more attractive language and format, and re-used. Islam stunts mental growth. Islam would have Kazakhs, and all other Central Asians, ignore their own pre-Islamic or non-Islamic culture.
Islam would condemn them, and their children, to the bleakest kind of existence.
To the extent that those "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Kazakhs can be made to slough it off altogher, to resist the Total Explanation of the Universe that is Islam, the better Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Russia, and the rest of the world will be.
One hopes this is realized in Astana and Almaty, in Moscow and Washington, in New Delhi and Beijing.
Unfortunately, Islam is a bottom-up phenomenon. It is a phenomenon which rouses the rabble without really organizing it, except for the most crude and temporary kinds of organization. As a result, it is capable of generating a great deal of social instability purely from below. I do not know whether the politicians in Almaty or Moscow have the answer to that, and, unfortunately, a bit more than half of the total population of this rather cobbled-together state is nominally Muslim and open, one way or another, to Muslim preaching. On the other hand, without the crazed design given to this artificial Soviet state by Stalin (Commissar for Nationalities) in the early twenties, which includes a good half of Russian Siberia in its borders, Kazakhstan would be no different from the other Central Asian states, small, inhospitable, and quickly relapsing into various kinds of tyranny or civil war.