China’s Xinjiang camps target all 15 million Muslims, not just religious leaders.

Evidence

According to Darren Byler, a leading expert on China’s total surveillance state, the network of concentration camps “targeted the entire Muslim population of 15 million people in Xinjiang. It precipitated a criminalization of Islamic practice and a number of Uyghur and Kazakh cultural traditions. Initially only religious leaders were sent to camps, but by 2017 the War on Terror became a program of preventing Uyghurs from being Muslim and, to a certain extent, from being Uyghur or Kazakh.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 555

Categorization

• XREF: This is the empirical anchor for the reader’s global-synthesis project reading alongside Iftikhar — one national case in the transposed War on Terror.
• SEED: The quote documents the escalation from targeting religious leaders to criminalizing an entire ethnic-religious identity, an angle for a piece on how ‘counterterrorism’ broadens into ethnic cleansing.