China recruits ethnic minorities to round up fellow Muslims

In the past few years, as China stepped up its crackdown on Muslim minorities in the western Xinjiang region, it leaned on officers from those same targeted ethnic groups, putting them in the uncomfortable position of monitoring and arresting members of their own communities.

How we know: One former police officer, Baimurat, an ethnic Kazakh Muslim who managed to escape, offered The Times a rare, firsthand glimpse into the security apparatus of the region, where the government has detained as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in a network of widely condemned indoctrination camps.

Details: In 2016, after a series of anti-government attacks in Xinjiang, the Chinese government escalated its effort to crackdown on minorities there to turn them into loyal supporters of the party and get them to give up their Islamic faith.

That’s when the region’s security forces began recruiting people from those targeted groups, like Mr. Baimurat, who had returned after a stint in Kazakhstan. He said his job included examining travelers at police checkpoints, monitoring mobile phones for any content considered subversive and taking handcuffed people into facilities that were basically prisons.

Officers like him, said Mr. Baimurat, were also closely scrutinized for any signs of disloyalty. They were required to attend political indoctrination meetings and prohibited from speaking anything but Chinese.

“I came to regret ever coming back to China,” he said.