The recording was shared exclusively with The Associated Press by the Norway-based nonprofit Uyghur Hjelp.

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the list of banned songs indicates repression in Xinjiang continues, albeit more subtly, said Rian Thum, a senior lecturer in East Asian history at the University of Manchester.

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“Besh pede” was flagged for its religious content, though the song hardly incites religious extremism, said Rachel Harris, a professor of ethnomusicology at SOAS University of London.

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In fact, a common denominator across the banned songs is that many were written or performed by imprisoned Uyghur musicians, said Elise Anderson, a nonresident senior fellow at the New Lines Institute who specializes in Uyghur issues.

The New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, known as New Lines Institute for short, is an American non-partisan think tank focused on international affairs.

The New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy was founded in 2019 by Iraqi-American entrepreneur Dr Ahmed Alwani as a non-partisan think tank based in Washington D.C.

It’s always surreal to see the kind of policy that comes out of the US and the UK with regard to religious minorities - particularly Muslims - and then read the journalism that these same countries produce.

Even Norway… a country that’s been ratcheting up its mass arrest and deportation of Muslims going on for the last decade, with a specific eye towards anyone who might be “radical”, seems to have no problem with anti-Muslim public policy on a national level.

I wonder what Yashar Xiaohelaiti, Mahmoud Khalil, and the Brize Norton 5 would have to say to each other if they’d been confined to the same prison cell.