Guma

In Guma County, on the foothills of the Kunlun, in the locality of Kulan-Aryk, Sanju, etc., are between 300 and 350 persons affiliated to the Naiman, Teyit, Kesek, Boston and other groups .

This is an original characteristic of the Turkic languages which has disappeared from the other dialects of modern Uygur, but it has been partly retained by the Lobnor dialect and the Hotan dialect spoken in the County of Guma.

In 2019, Guma County planned to sterilise 14,1 per cent of married women of childbearing age; Khotan announced a goal of 34.3 per cent.

Radio Free Asia reported that Friday’s attack took place in Guma County, known as Pishan in Chinese. A man who answered the telephone at the Pishan County Public Security Bureau said he had no information about the attack, and a man at the Pishan County People’s Hospital said, “We’re not allowed to answer your question, sorry.”

Among those who told NBC News they were detained was Omer, who was born in Guma County, a predominantly Uighur part of Xinjiang region. He said his ordeal began in 2017 when he was arrested at the airport in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital and largest city, after returning from Egypt where he had been working for six months as a chef.

In a January article on the Chinese site NetEase, Mau Tao, a CCP official in Guma county of southern Xinjiang, said that “religious extremism” was behind the lack of ethnic unity between Uighurs and Han Chinese. He said that 2000 and 2010 national censuses showed that Xinjiang had the lowest rate of interethnic marriage among ethnic minorities.

He started by asking the elders and officials whether they knew of the discovery of any old books in the desert around Guma. Nobody had. Of the list of sites which Islam Akhun had included in his itinerary published by Hoernle, only two were known to them. As both lay close to Guma, Stein rode out to inspect them.