"Xi Jinping steps up persecution of majority-Muslims in Xinjiang to wipe out political and ethnic threats to his regime

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These camps, large and small, remain swaddled in heavy security and secrecy, despite the Chinese government’s new pledge of transparency. There are five major ones around Hotan, a city in southern Xinjiang, including the one where Mr Kebayir said he was detained.

Recent satellite images showed that a new detention facility has risen in the desert across the road from his former camp, surrounded by high walls and telltale watchtowers.

Efforts by New York Times reporters to approach the camps, factories and other religious sites were repeatedly blocked by plainclothes security officials — often giving outlandish explanations

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The camps have already swallowed up one million Muslims or more, by most estimates, wrenching them from their families and homes and subjecting them to what activists, relatives of detainees and former detainees describe as stressful, even debilitating, indoctrination.

Detainees, they say, are forced to denounce their religious beliefs and embrace the ideology of the Communist Party.

The establishment of the detention and re-education system — which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently called “the stain of the century” — has generated the harshest criticism of China’s record on human rightssince the bloody Tiananmen crackdown in 1989.

The government seems more eager to quell international outrage over the camps than to begin to wind down the far-flung system it has built over the past two years.

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Only hours later, Kebayir and his wife and daughter were no longer at the house and could not be reached, not even through the officials who set up the interview. One of them said Kebayir had business to deal with and had turned off his phone."