While investigating the detentions of women in the XUAR, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of internment camps since early 2017, Radio Free Asia (RFA)’s  Uyghur Service spoke with a police officer in the prefecture-level city of Turpan (in Chinese, Tulufan) who volunteered that a village elder named Zaytunhan Ismail had recently been arrested.

“I believe it was around January … it’s been quite a while now,” the officer from Turpan’s Chatqal township said of the 67-year-old Ismail.

She said that Ismail’s arrest stemmed from an incident that had occurred in her village a year earlier, when the husband of someone in the neighborhood “came back home drunk” and the couple “exchanged some words.”

“[Ismail] came and told him not to do this,” the officer told  RFA’s Uyghur Service.

“His wife was pregnant, apparently, and she told him not to [fight with her] while she was carrying the baby. The man who’d come home drunk had been cursing [at his wife]. She told him he shouldn’t do that.”

According to the police officer, Ismail was “involved in neighborhood matters large and small” in her village, and frequently “set things right and [gave advice] on what not to do.”

After denying the camps' existence initially, China in 2019 changed tack and began describing the camps in the region as residential training centers that provide vocational training for Uyghurs, discourage radicalization, and help protect the country from terrorism, reports RFA.

But reporting by RFA and other media outlets indicate that those in the camps are detained against their will and subjected to political indoctrination, routinely face rough treatment at the hands of their overseers and endure poor diets and unhygienic conditions in the often-overcrowded facilities.