I'm Leah Belletto and on this Sky News Daily, we are asking what happened to China's

Uyghur camps and I suppose to do this justice, we need to understand who the Uyghur community are,

their relationship to Beijing and essentially what they went through.

To do this, I'm joined by the lovely Helen Ann Smith, who is Sky's Asia correspondent. We're also joined by Tom Cheshire, your predecessor, who covered that patch for nearly...

Four and a half years. Four and a half years. Okay. But you're now Sky's data and forensics correspondent. Tom, can I start with you? Because you spent many years, didn't you? Investigating, reporting on the Uyghur community. So who are they? And what have they been through? I mean, they've been through a tremendous amount. I mean, the Uyghurs are recognising an ethnic minority in China's around 11 or 12 million. In China, there's also diaspora, lots of connections with countries like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, but big communities in Turkey as well, Saudi Arabia, mainly Muslim groom. They're in Xinjiang, which is in the far north-west of the country.

They've been there for hundreds of years. You still have Uighurs mainly in the south of the country

and still, you know, a very clear identity when you visit those parts.

Helen Ann, you have recently been to Xinjiang and we'll talk about that more in a moment.

But Tom, you know, when COVID hit,

Xinjiang will suddenly lock down and only now we're starting to get access for Western

journalists to go in there.

But what did you know of the area?

Yeah, I mean, it's a huge, huge area to start with.

You've got, you know, amazing mountains, things like that. It's got these flatlands, grasslands too. Then you've got you know amazing mountains things like that it's got

these flatlands grasslands too then you've got big cities like rumci which is its capital

which has a lot more han chinese so that's the dominant ethnicity in china but if you go close to the

border southwest kashka hotel places like that have a lot more of a wiga identity and what

what happened with covid though i mean this happened everywhere in China.

Yeah.

Very hard to get places because you had these health codes, but especially with Xinjiang. So it's always been a sensitive region. During that pandemic, you know, it wasn't even the case that you might get quarantine. It's just you couldn't get a flight there because because Beijing had a case or Xinjiang had a case and really spent a lot of time in isolation.

So for a long time we didn't really know what was going on in the ground.

Tell us, I mean, you recently got back from Xinjiang. It's an absolutely beautiful province. I mean, you know, I was looking out the window when our plane came into land. Just the most astonishing mountain ranges, you know, snow capped. And then you sort of flew on a bit and it's this vast deserts. The cities are

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