Abduweli Ayup, a Norway-based fellow with the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN), have revealed that at least 613 Imams have been held at detention camps.
“We started this search in 2018, around May … and after the interviews finished in November [that year], I found that the most targeted population was religious figures,” said Ayup, speaking at a webinar hosted last week by the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) entitled “Where are the Imams? Evidence for mass detention of Uyghur religious figures.”
“At the time, we had about 300 imams listed [as detained] and then we kept updating the figures and by June, the last update, it was 613 imams listed.”
Ayup suffered months of detention and torture while imprisoned in 2013-2014 after fighting for social and