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Arabic text accompanying the photographs says “Chinese Da’ash,” using what is roughly an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

As of Thursday afternoon, the pictures had been shared more than 1,200 times and “liked” more than 9,500 times. The Iraqi Defence Ministry did not say what evidence it had that the fighter was Chinese.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

Chinese officials have expressed concerns about citizens’ venturing abroad to join the Islamic State or other jihadist groups in the Middle East, or of their being influenced by such groups to carry out attacks within China.

Wu Sike, who until Wednesday was China’s special envoy to the Middle East, said at a news conference in late July that about 100 Chinese fighters were being trained or were fighting in the Middle East. Wu said that number was based on reports by foreign news organizations. Most of the fighters were ethnic Uighurs, he said, referring to a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim people who live in Xinjiang, a region in western China.

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The Chinese government often says Uighur terrorists are to blame for a surge in violence in Xinjiang, while foreign scholars and terrorism analysts say the government appears to be exaggerating its reports of terrorist activities. Beijing has not released much evidence of what it has labeled terrorist cells and operations in the region.

The leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, mentioned Chinese fighters in a speech this summer at the start of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. In the nearly 20-minute speech, released online July 1, Baghdadi listed 12 nationalities of fighters in the Islamic State, one of them being Chinese, according to a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, an organization in Maryland that tracks jihadist messages.