"It is the duty of Muslims today to stand by the side of their wounded and wronged brothers in East Turkestan," Libi said in a video recording posted on an Islamist website, according to SITE Intelligence group.

East Turkestan is the name used by Al-Qaeda for China's Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang.

"Let our Muslim brothers in Turkestan know that there is no way for salvation and that there is no way to lift oppression and injustice but with truthful return to their faith and attachment to it as much as possible; to seriously prepare for jihad (holy war)," Libi said.

Wearing a white-and-red checkered turban and a vest, Libi also called on Muslims to launch a media campaign to raise awareness of what is happening in China and about the "atheist Chinese colonisation."

Libi said that the Turkic Muslim community is suffering from discrimination and pledged that the communist Chinese regime would face the same destiny as the former Soviet Union, which Islamist fighters had ferociously battled in Afghanistan.

"As for the state of atheism and stubbornness, it is [doomed] to extinction," he said. "They will experience that which the Russian bear experienced in terms of disintegration and division."

The Uighurs of Xinjiang province complain of cultural and religious discrimination practised against them by the Chinese state in the name of the fight against separatism.

Chinese authorities have said that riots in the Xinjiang city of Urumqi by Muslim Uighurs on July 5 killed 184 people -- most of whom were Han, China's dominant ethnic group -- and injured more than 1,600.

Uighur leaders accuse Chinese forces of opening fire on peaceful protests and say that Uighurs have been killed in subsequent mob attacks.

In July, Al-Qaeda threatened for the first time to attack Chinese interests overseas in retaliation for the deaths of Muslims in Xinjiang, risk analysis consultancy Stirling Assynt reported at the time.

The call, which came from the jihadist netork's North African arm, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was swiftly rejected by exiled Uighur leaders.

Rebiya Kadeer, the Washington-based head of the World Uighur Congress, said she opposed the use of violence in her campaign to bring greater rights for the ethnic group in Xinjiang.

Uighurs generally practise a moderate brand of Islam influenced by Sufi mysticism and earlier shamanistic traditions.

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