🇨🇳The Telegraph's @sophia_yan criss-crossed Xinjiang over nine days to investigate China’s crackdown on the Uyghurs.
🚨Part one of our special video series focuses on the culture erasure of the Uyghurs
Watch it in full, here: …
🇨🇳China’s Xinjiang region is a landlocked corner of far western China, closer in fabric to Baghdad than Beijing.
Now Xinjiang’s heritage is disappearing...
🔴The UN estimates that Chinese authorities have locked up more than a million people in fortified detention centres in the area.
In our special video series, @sophia_yan examines what’s happening now on the ground in Xinjiang
Read more ⬇️
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/1…
🔴 EXCLUSIVE: The report reveals that the site where a mosque once stood in the heart of China’s Xinjiang region is now under construction to become a commercial tower block that will house a Hampton by Hilton hotel
🕌The mosque is just one of many to disappear across Xinjiang.
It comes as China erases the region’s cultural and religious heritage as part of its forced assimilation of Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslim minorities
🔴 @ASPI_org estimates that 16,000 mosques in Xinjiang have been destroyed or damaged due to Chinese government policies since 2017.
Roughly 60% of the region’s Islamic sacred sites, such as shrines and cemeteries, have been razed or altered
➡️One mosque has even been turned into a public toilet.
Uyghur script above the entrance archway depicting the name “Allah” has been covered in black paint
🔴Xinjiang’s disappearing heritage was especially stark in Hotan’s city centre, where Telegraph reporters visited nine former mosque locations.
When trying to access Imam Musa Kazim mosque, reporters were assaulted by 30 men in plain clothes, who hit the journalists in the face
🇨🇳China has rejected allegations of mosque and shrine demolition as “total nonsense,” saying renovations are needed to give them a “modern touch.”
🚨Watch the first part of this special video series from @sophia_yan here 👇
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/1…
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