ISTANBUL (AP) Every morning, Meripet wakes up to her nightmare: The Chinese government has turned four of her children into orphans, even though she and their father are alive.

Meripet and her husband left the kids with their grandmother at home in China when they went to nurse Meripets sick father in Turkey. But after Chinese authorities started locking up thousands of their fellow ethnic Uighurs for alleged subversive crimes such as travel abroad, a visit became exile.

Then, her mother-in-law was also taken prisoner, and Meripet learned from a friend that her 3- to 8-year-olds had been placed in a de facto orphanage in the Xinjiang region, under the care of the state that broke up her family.

Its like my kids are in jail, Meripet said, her voice cracking. My four children are separated from me and living like orphans.

Meripets family is among tens of thousands swept up in President Xi Jinpings campaign to subdue a sometimes restive region, including the internment of more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities that has alarmed a United Nations panel and the U.S. government . Now there is evidence that the government is placing the children of detainees and exiles into dozens of orphanages across Xinjiang.

The orphanages are the latest example of how China is systematically distancing young Muslims in Xinjiang from their families and culture, The Associated Press has found through interviews with 15 Muslims and a review of procurement documents. The government has been building thousands of so-called bilingual schools, where minority children are taught in Mandarin and penalized for speaking in their native tongues. Some of these are boarding schools, which Uighurs say can be mandatory for children and, in a Kazakh familys case, start from the age of 5.

China says the orphanages help disadvantaged children, and it denies the existence of internment camps for their parents. It prides itself on investing millions of yuan in education in Xinjiang to steer people out of poverty and away from terrorism. At a regular news briefing Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the measures taken in Xinjiang were necessary for stability, development, harmony and to fight ethnic separatists.

But Uighurs fear that these measures are essentially wiping out their ethnic identity, one child at a time. Experts say what China is doing echoes how white colonialists in the U.S., Canada and Australia treated indigenous children policies that have left generations traumatized.

This is an ethnic group whose knowledge base is being erased, said Darren Byler, a researcher of Uighur culture at University of Washington. What were looking at is something like a settler colonial situation where an entire generation is lost.

For Meripet, the loss is agony; it is the absence of her children and the knowledge they are in state custody. A year and a half after leaving home, the 29-year-old mother looked at a photo of a brightly painted building surrounded by barbed wire where her children are believed to be held. She fell silent. And then she wept.

When I finally see them again, will they even recognize me? she asked. Will I recognize them?

PROTECTION OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN

When Xi came to power in 2012, an early challenge to his rule was a surge in violent attacks that killed several hundred people and which Beijing pinned on Uighur separatists. Since then, Xi has overseen the most extensive effort in recent years to quell Xinjiang, appointing in 2016 the former Tibet party boss Chen Quanguo to lead the troubled region bordering Afghanistan.

Chen rolled out unprecedented security measures such as internment camps that hold Muslims without trial and force them to renounce their faith and swear loyalty to the Communist Party. China has described religious extremism as an illness that needs to be cured through what it calls transformation through education. Former detainees say one can be thrown into a camp for praying regularly, reading the Quran, going abroad or even speaking to someone overseas.