The Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), also known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), is a Sunni Uyghur separatist organization that was formed in 1997 with the goal of creating an independent Islamist state in Turkestan (in what is now the Xinjiang province of northwestern China). The charter of the party said that its goal was to liberate East Turkestan from "Communist Chinese occupation" and to cooperate with Mujahideen across the world to "empower Allah's sharia on the world" and restore the caliphate. Their struggle against the government of communist China was sidetracked by its involvement in other jihads such as the War in North-West Pakistan against the government of Pakistan, and the TIP also fought against the Syrian Arab Republic during the Syrian Civil War. The TIP was allied to fellow jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, the Taliban, and Islamic State.
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