IRAN, modern country

[ben ttech]

back in the late 90's a radio host i listened to had 'stan' report

went on for months and even hosted a tour to the area
christ

imagine what he payed not to get his tour of fools shot up

[dill786]

i see on YT that lots of vbloggers are going to 3rd world countries more than ever before, at first i thought it was just for likes and subscribers but now i am thinking it's more for spiritual reasons, if you live in the first world, and you go to another 1st world country yes its different culture, but you have the same mental outlook mostly as your own country, this is one of the reasons i see Europeans or westerns travelling to Central Asia and South Asia, just bumming round, they come back as changed people with total different outlooks on life, one of the other main reasons is people now know that these countries are not dangerous as there have been told by there governments..

i know IRAN is not a 3rd world country but its really fascinating architecture especially in cities like Shiraz and Isfahan, back in the days well before YT and social media, the only way you could read up bout these countries in asia minor was through blogging sites were people uploaded grainy anlogue pics, i used to read them blogs while i was reading up on OG back in the days, and i used to get fascinated by these western backpackers who would travel to these countries taking awesome pics of the mosques and temples and just general street life, kudos to these backpackers as they obviously did not listen to the western propaganda and went travelling to these countries..

When you get to see these slick 4k pics online i don't know for some reason i prefer the old analoge pics they're more engaging than the slick pics, back in the overgrow days i use to read about weed and travel to mysterious countries, that was one of my fave things to back in the days...

Now the world has become really smaller it has lost a bit of magic.

[Prawn Connery]

You can see the narrow pass which links Afghanistan to China. It's in between Tajikistan and Pakistan.

I wrote this in October 2001 when I went there to cover the start of the war in Afghanistan. It is part of a 3200-word essay published in newspaper magazines around the world at the time. I spent a bit of time in the region. All the other journos went to Peshawar when the war started, but none wen to the Chinese-Afghan border. Except me and an Aussie photographer I worked with at the time.

It was an amazing trip.

The mountains are snow-capped, sheer-grey and spectacular – rising from white-river valleys to almost 7,000 metres – when the bus stops along the potholed road and two dusty women climb aboard.
One is in her child-bearing teens; the other old enough to be her mother. They are carrying a baby – they sit down next to us on the bus – and the older woman starts to breast-feed as the younger cracks melon seeds and spits them on the floor. Their hair is matted and they smell of milk. They are dressed in bright, colourful robes and skins, and smile with the pinched-red cheeks of dusky Tibetan nomads.
Except we are not in Tibet. We are on the Karakoram Highway between Kashgar and Tashkurgan – high in the Padmir Mountain range bordering Afghanistan and Tajikistan – in the far-western Chinese province of Xinjiang. This is the ancient Silk Road.
The women are Kyrgyz plains dwellers, hitching a ride to their mud-brick village on the remote and barren Padmir Plateau. The elements age people fast in these parts. Plants are red and skies are blue – the air is thin and the sun is strong. How difficult to survive lest wage a war. Yet every kilometre, every mountain, every hour we are closer to confrontation.
With the world at war with Afghanistan, Xinjiang is on the front lines. Bordering eight Central Asian states – including Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Mongolia and the disputed Kashmir region between Pakistan and India – the remote north-western province has been caught between global crisis and China’s own long-running “war on terrorism”.
Three days after the September 11 US attacks, China closed the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan to mobilise huge numbers of troops along its western corridors and borders. Crack People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units were posted from the provincial capital of Urumqi. Xinjiang – already one of the most well-guarded regions in the country – was put on high alert.
Logistically, China could afford to move quickly because it is permanently prepared for an Islamic uprising. The Kyrzgik women we meet on the bus represent only one of 13 ethnic minorities in Xinjiang – all of them Muslim. China’s “minority” Uygurs make up almost half the province’s sparse 20 million population; and it is they who, for the past 52 years, have born the brunt of China’s hard-line stance against secessionism.
Xinjiang neighbours Tibet, and it is interesting to draw allusions. Both are deeply religious – Tibet Buddhist; Xinjiang Muslim. Both tasted self-rule briefly during the Chinese civil war years – Tibet from 1911 to 1951; Xinjiang from 1933-36 and 1944-49, when it was known as East Turkestan. Both are now ruled by Beijing as Autonomous Regions. Both still harbour dreams of self-determination – at least to some extent – and both have seen sporadic uprisings quickly quashed by the PLA.
But only one – Tibet – has a spiritual leader and a global voice. The mountains and deserts of Xinjiang have captured the imagination of travellers, traders and tourists along the Silk Road for more than 2,000 years. But they have never captured the attention of Hollywood, nor been the focus of wide-spread international outcry.
Perhaps this says a lot about the Uygur people themselves who, like their Turkic ancestors, continue to quietly forge their lives from an inhospitable land; expressing themselves the only way many of them can – inshallah, God willing – through Islam. But even that has changed since the events of September 11.

[Prawn Connery]

This one's for Bob. While he laps up Max Blumenthal's claims China is not oppressing its Uygur population – claiming it as Western propaganda – I was there, on the ground, when it was happening more than 20 years ago.

This story was commissioned by Time magazine and was embargoed until October 9, 2001.

The first victims of the global war on terrorism were executed last week – their deaths having everything and nothing to do with the September 11 attacks on the US and rising tensions in Afghanistan.
The two men were convicted Chinese separatist Uygurs. Tried in public, they were led away by police and shot in the back of the head on the outskirts of the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar in remote western Xinjiang province.
Bordering eight Central Asian states – including Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Mongolia and the disputed Kashmir region between Pakistan and India – Xinjiang has been caught between global events and China’s own long-running war against terrorism.
Many see China’s co-operation with the US as an excuse to take an even tougher line against its own perceived threat. In Xinjiang, this means China’s indigenous muslim Uygurs who, despite their minority status, make up almost half the province’s sparse 17 million population (shared with 12 other ethnic muslim denominations).
Historically part of China, Xinjiang existed briefly as an independent Islamic state – East Turkistan – between the civil war years of 1933 and 1949. After China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forcibly repatriated it, members of the self-declared Uygur Islamists continued to wage a secessionist war against Beijing. In the past four years they have bombed buses, fanned riots and assassinated local Chinese sympathisers and judges.
Unlike the rest of the world’s recent efforts against terrorism, Beijing’s response has been both swift and brutal. In April, 30 separatist Uygurs were reportedly executed in four Xinjiang districts alone. The following month, police arrested 25 in Kashgar on charges of “buying guns to create an independent Islamic republic”.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin – who has described terrorism as “a grave common scourge” – is perhaps even more fixated on muslim extremism than the US and Britain. He fears religious-led terrorism in Afghanistan and other neighbouring regions (including Tibet) could influence and undermine Beijing’s control of oil-rich Xinjiang – which may hold as many as (74 billion barrels, or) three times known US reserves.
Such fears were the drive behind the June summit of the so-called “Shanghai Six” group of nations – headed by China and Russia – which agreed to strengthen military co-operation between the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Originally set up to resolve border issues, its focus has shifted sharply since the September 9 attacks. Not least because of reports the hard-line ruling Taliban has been training Uygur guerillas in Afghanistan to fight Chinese occupation of its predominantly muslim areas – and of Uygur volunteers offering to aid the Taliban in the event of war with the US.
(Beijing has continued to deny that fugitive Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden – accused of masterminding the US attacks – may already be in Xinjiang, while the latest rumours have him holed up in an old tunnel network built during the Soviet war in Afghanistan’s Wakham Corridor. The tunnels are believed to open into China, Tajikistan and Pakistan.)
The terrorist threat also coincided with Chinese National Day on October 1 – traditionally the country’s most heavily-guarded event. Nationwide concerns about security over the holidy sparked a 70-day campaign to purge activists from outlawed cult groups, “suspicious” ethnic minorities, gangsters, prostitutes, beggars and migrant workers in major cities.
It has put added pressure on the already tenuous relationship between local Uygurs and their Han Chinese rulers who often display open disdain for each other.
“I’ve just checked a Chinese man into a bed,” said one local hotel worker. “He said I can put anyone in his room except a Uygur.”
According to witnesses, dozens of suspected Uygur separatists have been rounded up in Kashgar over the past month – the culmination of which was the open trial and executions on September 25.
One local trader said his home had been raided three times in as many nights, and that entire Uygur settlements had been targetted in the lead-up to National Day as an apparent warning to separatists.
“They took some religious tapes and other personal documents, but I can’t tell you anymore,” he said. “Simply talking to foreigners will give [the police] an excuse to come after me again. I’m already lucky not to have been arrested – I’m too frightened to talk.”
Heavily-armed police have been patrolling the city nightly, while cars and pedestrians are routinely stopped and checked.
In the military town of Tashkurgan – 285km south of Kashgar and just 40km from the Afghan border – troops have been bolstered to overflowing. Senior PLA officers have been staying in local hotels, while schools have been requisitioned to house the swelling number of non-commissioned ranks.
China closed its border with Pakistan for two days after the US attacks to mobilise huge numbers of troops along its remote, mountainous borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. Military convoys continue to barrel south down the Karakoram Highway, through Kashgar and Tashkurgan towards the 4,700m Kunjerab pass.
“Tashkurgan has always been a military outpost,” said one local Uygur shop owner. “But in recent weeks, the number of soldiers has more than doubled. Every day many trucks arrive. Sometimes they stop [overnight]. Sometimes they keep going. The town is very tense at the moment, but no-one will speak out about the situation here. We’re used to seeing soldiers.”
Crack PLA units – reportedly some of the best trained in China – have been moved from the provincial capital of Urumqi to hi-altitude regions to conduct daily military exercises. According to one PLA soldier: “There are thousands of troops between here [Tashkurgan] and Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of them have been moved down since the US attacks. We’ve been told we’ll stay here as long as we’re needed.”
The US took the Chinese military build-up seriously enough to dispatch an envoy to Kashgar – 2nd Secretary to the US Embassy in Beijing, Arthur Marquardt – who completed a four-day fact finding mission last week (Sept 28). According to local sources, he met with minority muslim leaders including indigenous Uygurs, Uzbeks, Kazaks and Tajiks, to test sentiment for an expected US strike on Afghanistan. The muslim leaders were reportedly non-committal.
If anything, Marquardt’s visit summed up divided loyalties in the bustling Silk Road tourist region. “Kashgar is a peaceful city,” said one local tour guide. “But if the US goes to war with Afghanistan, not everyone here will support them.”
A local Uygur student contradicted: “Afghanistan may be an Islamic country, but what they did in New York was a terrible thing – no-one here can support that kind of terrorism. However, there is still a lot of hatred towards the Chinese.”
A local taxi driver put it even more succinctly: “America good! China ptew!” he spat on his thumb. “We welcome anyone but them.”
Many Uygurs say they are simply victims. “The Chinese come here and they bring new technology – which is good,” says one local student. “But then most of the good jobs go to Chinese and not us.
“Most of the Chinese live in new parts of the city and they don’t mix with us at all. Perhaps it is because they don’t accept our religion. Perhaps it is because many Uygurs still cannot speak good Chinese – and almost no Chinese speak Uygur. But for most of us, we don’t want trouble. We only want to get on with our lives the same as anyone else.”

[ben ttech]

you claim to be on the ground
next you parrot public horshit

your a goddamn fraud prawn
an escuse for power
bought and sold

your shoud be ashamed but as is clear you wont and will never

fucking scumbag

[Intrinsic]

Dang! Now I want to make my next long distance hike, the Silk Road.


Wakhan Corridor

[dill786]

Horseback riding through the corridor would be epic...

The people are really friendly and helpful, drop them a few hundred Afghan rupees. You will have to force the money on them as they are reluctant to take it, better just give the money to the kids. 1 thousand rupees is fuck all to westerners, maybe 5 dollars or less but to the locals it's a day's pay labouring in the fields....

[dill786]

gun market in Peshawar, selling American army surplus, maybe they got it from the American bases when they left overnight leaving tonnes of stuff behind, most of the edibles come from Dubai though..... most of knifes etc all comes from China

[dill786]

one of my long time friend of mine who managed to get mining license from the Taliban to mine for gems in Kandahar province, big bucks in gemstones especially afghan..

[ben ttech]

i got over gun long ago but knew of their manifacture regionally

what the fucks up with the dog in the cage????

thats some shit