Our latest: using satellite images, detainee interviews and leaked videos we reconstructed one of Xinjiang’s camps to give a detainee’s eye view of life inside.

Over the past five years, the camps and campaign of oppression against Muslims has come to dominate this town. In 2016 a small detention centre just outside town could hold 300 people. By the end of 2018 it was ten times larger.

This camp now has space for 3,700 people, around one in every 50 of Mongolküre county’s residents. Camps elsewhere around the city could hold around 1,700 more. We wanted to understand what life was like inside.

We modelled the camp in 3d to do that. We took meaurements from satellite images and counted the windows, while architectural and construction knowledge, in depth interviews with detainees and videos showing these places under construction filled in the rest.

This video was from inside a camp in Huocheng, Xinjiang. You can see inside the cells, where multiple people would spend 23 hrs/day, the shared toilet and washing facilities, one of the classrooms. Leaked by an incredibly brave construction worker.

In the city, outside the camps, there was also a crackdown on religious practice, with house to house searches, looking for evidence that the people living there were practising Muslims – a Quran, even books with Arabic script.

Sometime between 2016 and 2018 the dome and minarets were removed from this city mosque, replaced with a pitched roof. Left hand image 2016, right 2018.

Here's the full story. It was fantastic to work with @meghara on this https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/inside-xinjiang-detention-camp