 During the Ili Rebellion, American telegrams reported that the Soviet secret police threatened to assassinate Muslim leaders from Ining and put pressure on them to flee to "inner China" via Tihwa (Ürümqi), White Russians grew fearful of Uyghur Muslim mobs as they chanted, "We freed ourselves from the yellow men, now we must destroy the white.In the last days of World War II the USSR entered the war against Japan and invaded western China.In doing so, Soviet forces encountered, to their surprise, Russian Old Believer villages.