Turkic

The team believes Tugunbulak and the smaller city, Tashbulak, were bustling settlements between the 8th and 11th centuries, during the Middle Ages, when the area was controlled by a powerful Turkic dynasty.

China is accused of running labor transfer programs in which Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are forced to toil in factories as part of a longstanding campaign of assimilation and mass detention.

The area is populated mostly by Kyrgyz and Uyghurs, ethnic Turkic minorities who are predominantly Muslim and have been the target of a state campaign of forced assimilation and mass detention.

Indigenous people, mostly Muslim Bashkirs, a Turkic ethnic group, make up just under a third of the region’s population.

Alsynov has also in the past criticised military mobilisation in the region as "genocide" of the Bashkir people, a Turkic race closely related to the Tatars which inhabits the southern Ural mountains.