China has more than a million ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims held in a concentration camp in the northwest province of Xinjiang. Xinjiang is home to 10 million Muslims.

This has been going on since 2017 and is being done supposedly to wipe out their old lifestyle.  These internment camps are said to be a part of President Xi Jinping’s so-called war against terror.

China has denied the claim that they are abusing the Muslims’ human rights but recent leaked documents, as reported by the New York Times, show the details of how the people are being held in camps.  They are locked up, brainwashed and punished.  They are also forced to do things such as eating pork or drinking alcohol which is against their religion.

Reports claim China has been destroying burial grounds where the Uighur have been buried leaving behind human bones to erase their identity.

U.S. Secretary Mike Pompeo said the second leaked document confirms that China has been committing “very significant” human rights abuses against the Muslims.  The NGO Human Rights Watch says that this government poses a “global threat to human rights.”

Kayrat Smarkhan, an ethnic Kazakh from China who experienced the camp himself, said “Even the slightest of disobedience, or just a sloppily made bed, would lead to punishment.”

Some of the inmates have their hands and feet tied in shackles for days and others are forced to stay in painful positions.

A Uighur woman tells her experience in a book she wrote called What Happened To Me. It explains how she had been deprived of sleep in an overcrowded cell and tied to a chair and tortured. She lost contact with her son and her husband. She was given the news her son died due to mysterious circumstances and when her husband came back from Egypt to retrieve her from China, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

China has denied that there have been concentration camps but the stories of the people tell otherwise.  Beijing claims it is nothing but a re-education camp.  Critics of these decisions believe the Chinese government is doing this as an ethnic cleansing, with the Uighur and Turkic Muslims being replaced by the Han Chinese.