Erik Prince's Frontier Services Group Announces Xinjiang Training Facility Amid Uyghur Detention Campaign

Frontier Services Group announced plans to build a training facility in Xinjiang province, the western Chinese region where as many as 1 million Uyghur Muslims had been placed in extrajudicial detention camps under comprehensive surveillance. FSG’s Chinese website posted a statement saying the company had signed a deal to run a training base in Kashgar, though an FSG spokesman later told Reuters the statement was “published in error by a staff member in Beijing” and removed from the website.

According to a March 2018 press release signed by FSG’s board (including deputy chairman Erik Prince), the company planned to spend $15.4 million to establish “training facilities” and purchase “security equipment and vehicles” in Pakistan and Xinjiang. The disclosure confirmed board-level approval for Xinjiang operations at the height of China’s mass detention and surveillance campaign, during which China’s Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) had flagged 1.8 million Uyghurs for investigation and placed over one million people in detention facilities.

Prince later told Al-Jazeera that FSG “has zero footprint in Xinjiang, China,” and in May 2019, an FSG spokesperson stated “We have no business in Xinjiang and are not building training centres there.” However, the March 2018 board-approved financial disclosure and the February 2019 Chinese-language website announcement documented FSG’s stated intent to establish operations in Xinjiang, regardless of whether those operations were ultimately implemented.

The Xinjiang announcement occurred while China was implementing systematic human rights violations against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, including mass surveillance using IJOP technology similar to the DarkMatter-Huawei systems, detention of over one million people in “re-education” camps, forced labor, and cultural destruction. FSG’s majority Chinese state ownership through CITIC Group (28% stake, with chairman Chang Zhenming serving as FSG board chairman) positioned the company as an instrument of Chinese state policy rather than an independent commercial entity.

The episode revealed how Prince’s network connected American military expertise, UAE surveillance technology (through DarkMatter), Israeli intelligence capabilities (through Carbyne and Unit 8200 personnel like Lital Leshem who worked for both Carbyne and Prince’s Frontier Resource Group), and Chinese state surveillance and detention infrastructure. Whether or not FSG ultimately established physical facilities in Xinjiang, the company’s board-approved plans to invest $15.4 million in the region during active ethnic cleansing operations demonstrated willingness to provide “training facilities” and “security equipment” in service of authoritarian mass detention and surveillance systems.