Perspective | China?s expanding war on Islam: Now they?re coming for the Kazakhs.

And while the targets have for years been supposed domestic enemies, China now pursues some Kazakhs with the same zeal — cleaving families and even violating Kazakhstan’s sovereignty to send them for reeducation in the expanding camp system.[New evidence emerges of China forcing Muslims into ‘reeducation’ camps]It’s unclear exactly how many people are in some sort of detention in Xinjiang, but the State Department estimates that between 800,000 and 2 million people have been detained since 2017. The state primarily targets Uighurs, the Turkic group that makes up the largest share of Muslims in China, but other Muslim minorities, like Kyrgyz, Hui and, increasingly, Kazakhs — both citizens of Kazakhstan and ethnic Kazakh Chinese nationals — have been caught in the broadening dragnet.Rian Thum, a senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham and an expert on Xinjiang, told me he was surprised to see Kazakhs swept up in the camps along with Uighurs, since Kazakhs had long been viewed by the Chinese state as a model Muslim group that accepted Communist Party rule. Religion, particularly Islam, is seen as contradictory to this Chinese identity, and officials have spoken openly about the need to “Sinicize” Islam and make it “compatible with socialism.” These efforts, however, have taken the form of an extreme human engineering project.“They said that I was a traitor because I lived in Kazakhstan,” said Gulzira Auelkhankyzy, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who spent 15 months in a reeducation camp in Xinjiang. For the thousands of ethnic Kazakhs sent to the camps who are Chinese nationals — even those who were permanent residents of Kazakhstan — there are few avenues for recourse, and cases like Otan’s and Auelkhankyzy’s are the exceptions.While the camps are the most extreme form of detention, other Kazakhs have been jailed or placed under house arrest, or simply had their passports seized upon entering China and are now unable to leave. The friend was released, but Azatbek was taken to China, and his relatives have not had contact with him since.Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who worked in a camp and crossed illegally into Kazakhstan in April 2018 after finding out that she herself would be detained in one, is another diplomatic headache for the Kazakh government. But Sauytbay’s case and the plight of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang have shifted public opinion to their side, and the Kazakh government has consequently engaged in behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Chinese to secure the release of some Kazakhs in the camps.While this diplomatic activity has been encouraging for families with relatives interned in Xinjiang, there are signs that the Kazakh authorities are unnerved by the outpouring of support at home for the detained Kazakhs.