The Taliban has deployed “suicide squad” bombers along the China Afghan border, in the region of Tajikistan, reports WION. The Taliban has always employed suicide squads to carry out bombings. There is some speculation that tensions with China may be related to the presence of Uyghur Muslims who fled China for the relative safety of Afghanistan. Many Uyghur families are worried that the Taliban may try to force them back across the Afghan/China border.

The Chinese have reportedly created “re-education camps,” for Chinese Muslims, similar to what Trump supporters have called for in the US. There have been reports of China providing inmates to Chinese companies as free, forced labor, but the Chinese government claims the camps are a national security matter, and are focused on fighting religious extremism.

Understanding of the situation between the Taliban and China is complicated by a number of factors. Right wing propaganda outlets in the US are eager to portray the Taliban and China as close allies, and an immediate threat to the US. US Media outlets have been accused of lazy and inaccurate reporting on relations between the Taliban and China. At this point, no major US News organization has reporters on the ground in Afghanistan to report on living conditions for Uyghur migrants, or those migrant’s views of the Taliban and China situation.

A recent report by the Middle East Institute characterizes Beijing’s stance toward’s the Taliban as a “cautious charm offensive,” and there is widespread speculation about Chinese interests in rare earth mineral deposits in the Afghan countryside.

At this point, only time will tell whether the Afghan suicide squads are an attempt to push Uyghur migrants back across the China/Afghan border, a threat to exterminate a more moderate Muslim sect that does not ascribe to the same hardline version of Sunni Islam that the Taliban practices, an attempt to simply limit the Uyghur’s to a strictly proscribed geographic area while inviting radicalized nationalist youth from the Uyghur community into the Taliban, or something else that the West has not yet comprehended.