The efforts of the Turkish Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan to receive international recognition had failed despite the dispatching of numerous envoys by Prime Minister Sabit Damolla to the USSR (Tashkent, Moscow), Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and India. The Soviet Union rejected all offers of dealing with Islamists. In Kabul, Kashgar representatives met the newly proclaimed King of Afghanistan Mohammad Zahir Shah and Prime Minister Sardar Mohammad Hashim Khan, asking for aid and a supply of arms. But both preferred to keep neutrality and not interfere in Chinese affairs. Other countries reacted the same way, refusing to recognize the envoys as representatives of an independent country. None of the regional powers wanted to make a challenge to the Soviet Union and China in their politics and to become engaged in bloody fighting in Xinjiang, which had already claimed the lives of around 100,000 of its inhabitants. This left the fledgling Republic, which was surrounded on almost all sides by hostile powers (Tungans, Soviets, and Chinese), with very little chance to survive.