Starting in 2002, the United States government detained twenty-two Uyghurs in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. The last three Uyghur detainees, Yusef Abbas, Hajiakbar Abdulghupur and Saidullah Khalik, were released from Guantanamo on December 29, 2013, when they were transferred to Slovakia. Uyghurs are an ethnic group from Central Asia native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Western China.