This is popular front, a podcast focused on the niche details of modern warfare and

underreported conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to Nathan Rooza.

He's a researcher and he's going to be telling us about his work looking into the brutal oppression

from the Chinese government against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

The Chinese government has been destroying their mosques brutally arresting them, putting them

into so-called re-education camps, and basically trying to destroy any identity that they had,

Nathan's going to tell us all about that, including the history, the militant groups,

and how this all came to be.

If you like what we're doing here at Popular Front, please go to Patreon.com slash Popular Front

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Firstly we should really go to who are the Uyghurs you know I mean I think that's

probably the best place to start we'll get into everything China has done to

them but a lot of people are completely unaware of this whole situation even down to who are the Uyghurs never heard of them so maybe you can explain that first of all.

Yeah so the Uyghurs are basically this there are Turkic they're a Turkic ethnic minority in Western China, and so they've sort of been

living there for as long as anyone can really remember in sort of, I think it was 900 AD Islam came through and sort of I think it was 900 a.d. Islam came through and sort of the whole the

whole the vast majority of them are now Muslims. The term Weiger itself is a bit

interesting though because it like wasn't really widely used

until the 1930s so there was no real term for what they were before then. Before that, like they had names for themselves

and the, in the community they were sometimes calling themselves Weiger, but like whenever you looked

at an outsider's account that would be called Uzbek or Kajik or just another different

Central Asian minority.

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