Why has Mongolia not had any problems with political violence by Muslims?

Question

The USA, Canada, Britain, France, Australia, Russia have all had Islamist terrorist attacks on their own soil. Many of these countries have also had people joining Islamist groups overseas such as the Taliban and ISIS.

Japan's terrorist attacks have largely been by non-Muslims, but Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of "The Satanic Verses" was murdered (although the perpetrator and motive isn't publicly known), and ISIS announced this year the killing of two Japanese hostages, claiming that they were in response to Japan's foreign policy. (I'm rather suspicious that they had already been murdered by ISIS prior to any announcements)

I haven't heard about any problems with political violence by Muslims in Mongolia. When searching about terrorism in Mongolia, the only information I found was an incident of eco-terrorism, plus news related to inner Mongolia in China.

One idea favoured by some on how to prevent political violence by Muslims is not to allow Muslims into a country, such as in the blog post ISLAMIC TERRORISM: WHY THERE IS NONE IN JAPAN. However, this isn't the case with Mongolia. About 3% of Mongolia is Muslim, mainly Kazakhs in the part of the country close to Kazakhstan.

Another idea on how to avoid political violence by Muslims is not to be involved militarily in Muslim countries. But while Mongolia has tried to play a neutral foreign policy, it has been involved in peace-keeping in Muslim countries, such as Iraq.

Has Mongolia been doing something right that other countries haven't done, and if so, what is it?

Answer 1

There are different "Muslims" - they aren't one contiguous, 100% identical block.

Specifically, Kazakhs are not nearly as high of a risk of being interested in insurgency, for a variety of reasons:

• Kazakhs aren't very religious compared to other largely-Muslim ethnicities. Partially, the reason is living for a long time in atheistic Socialist societies; partially, because they have not previously held major soveregnity the way Arabs or Persians did due to geopolitical history of the region. Your mentality is different when your national identity remembers grand old days of Caliphate or Ottoman Empire.

• Kazakhs in Mongolia don't have the same drive for independence, again due to geopolitical history. As opposed to Uighurs in China, who were (oversimplifying by a kilometer) conquered and suppressed, Kazakhs fled to Mongolia, to escape Russian Empire; and were allowed to settle. This is not a situation conductive to independence movements.

• Again with geopolitics, except present: Mongolia overall is a reasonably poor country; and unlike other notable conflicts involving Islam, there's just no major natural resources to carve out as reward for independence.

The above explains the lack of homegrown ethnic+religions conflict.

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And there's no international attacks because, with all due respect for Mongolia, the country just isn't important or powerful as a player. What's the point of attacking it? Yes it played a bit part in peacekeeping operations. I wasn't able to find the numbers, but seems like a batallion or so in strength. And chances are, they didn't really do any action.

Mounting a terrorist operation takes time and resources. If the payoff is that some random bit player doesn't send a batallion, you didn't really win anything, and the marginal cost is you spent resources that could be used to attack an important player.

To add to that, the first part also plays a role - it's far harder to mount an attack in foreign country unless you already have a friendly grassroots support on the ground, and radicalized native populace supplying recruits. The lack of domestic turmoil foils this.

Answer 2

Political violence by Muslim groups is usually triggered by one of those two elements :

1. They want to spread Islam by violence and attack non-believers. In that case they will attack powerful and iconic places, typically large iconic cities such as London, Paris, New York, etc... They will only attack first world economically prosperous countries, in a capital or major city.

2. They want to rebel against a terror regime in their own land, such as what happens in Xinjang. The people living there have seen their land so much destroyed by the Chinese and all attempts to rebel have been repressed in ruthless violence, so using ruthless violence themselves is the only option.

Mongolia fits neither of those criteria: The country is remote, poor and almost nobody would be able to tell the name of its capital without looking it up. The country is such a poor target for 1. style attack, because not enough people would care.

However the country is a rare island of a somewhat clean and democratic country in the region, so Muslims do not need to use violence to gets any kind of rights. They can hope to improve their lives with the more traditional way of taking law reforms to solve their problems. Khazaks and Uigurs are actually better off in Mongolia than in their respective home countries with both are under ruthless dictatorships regimes.

(My sources are: common sense for 1. and Silk Road to Ruins, written by Ted Rall for 2.)