Chinese authorities detaining hundreds of Uyghur Imams in Xinjiang

Beijing : As atrocities against Uyghur Muslims in China continue, Chinese authorities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), have now detained hundreds of Muslim Imams, according to an Uyghur linguist in exile.
The detention of Imams has created an atmosphere in which Uyghurs are ‘afraid of dying’, as there will be no one to oversee their funeral rites, reported Radio Free Asia.
Abduweli Ayup, a Norway-based activist associated with International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), informed that interviews with Uyghurs from the Xinjiang region have revealed that at least 613 imams were swept up in a campaign of extralegal incarceration that has seen up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities held in a vast network of internment camps in the region since early 2017.
“We started this search in 2018, around May…and after the interviews finished in November [that year], I found that the most targeted population was religious figures,” said Ayup, speaking at a Thursday webinar hosted by the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) titled ‘Where are the Imams? Evidence for mass detention of Uyghur religious figures.’ Ayup, who has suffered months of detention and torture while imprisoned in 2013-2014 after fighting for social and cultural rights through the promotion of Uyghur-language education, said he had also interviewed at least 16 former camp detainees who said the arrests of imams have upended the Uyghur community in the Xinjiang region.
According to Radio Free Asia, one of the former detainees living in the Netherlands told him that in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi, ‘people have to register and have to wait when somebody dies.’