All photos by Emily Feng
The story began like this: I was moving back to the United States, after having lived abroad for the last ten years, working as a foreign correspondent, and while all my belongings were being shipped across the Pacific Ocean, I offered to help NPR cover developments in Lebanon for a month. Two days after I landed in Beirut, the Assad regime in neighboring Syria fell, and Syria quickly became the bigger story.
While I was reporting on-the-ground in Syria, I noticed the presence of foreign fighters, particularly Central Asian ones. Some of them were clearly Uyghur. It took months to contact and negotiate access with them, but last summer, they agreed to do their first-ever on the record media interviews. With Uyghur-speaking activist Abduweli Ayup, as well as our Arabic-speaking producer Jawad Rizkallah, I headed to northern Syria.
Reporting on the Uyghurs in Syria was a complicated and enormously sensitive task.
Their existence has been cited by the Chinese Communist Party in its unjust detention and mass arrests of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and ethnic minority groups in China since 2017. Confirming their existence did not justify such a crackdown.
And as I recorded dozens of hours of interviews with the Uyghurs, it became clear that nearly all of the approximately 20,000 men, women, and children in the Syrian community did not start out intending to pick up a gun and become an armed, militant nationalist movement. They described terribly traumatic experiences in China, of physical violence, threat of detention and disappearance, and rampant discrimination, which eventually convinced them they had no future in their homeland.
This story I hope gives the Uyghurs and Syrians caught up in conflicts bigger than the ones of their own making some agency and voice.
But the Syrian Uyghurs have a controversial legacy in China and in Syria. Beijing sees them as extremists and terrorists complicit in fatal attacks against civilians—why? And how could I fact check claims made about Uyghur militants as a whole? While, in Syria, the Uyghurs scare minority communities and their presence as foreign fighters remains a touchy subject for Syrians. It was therefore more important than ever to interview not just the Uyghurs themselves but also the people they lived and fought alongside in Syria.
Then there is the issue of my own identity and how I present to the Uyghurs. I am Chinese American and spent nearly eight years living in Beijing. I speak fluent Mandarin and look very obviously Chinese. With Abduweli and Jawad by my side, I could make sure to speak to the Uyghurs in their mother tongue or in the language they now lived and worked in, Levantine Arabic. I was careful at first when meeting Uyghurs not to speak Mandarin; I was sensitive to triggering latent trauma they might associate with the language. I even took off the jade bangle I wore at all times and which my mother had given me, a symbol of protection and safety, especially for woman, in Chinese culture, because I didn’t want the Uyghurs to feel uncomfortable by reminders of Chinese culture.
I needn’t have worried. We were warmly welcomed by the community, which is historically very closed off to outsiders. And as I was later to find out, in dozens of interviews, that their antipathy and hostility was not towards Chinese people but to the government of China. Some Uyghurs were eager to speak Mandarin with me, a language they had spoken fluently in Xinjiang but no longer had the chance to practice in Syria.
Frankly, harder to deal with were the living conditions in Idlib, the city in northern Syria around which most Uyghurs live. More than 13 years of war left much of the city in a dilapidated state and destroyed critical infrastructure. There were no functioning hotels, and I ended up leasing a furnished apartment for a month with a diesel-fueled water heater that belched black smoke but no showerhead, meaning I took bucket baths for a month.
The discomfort was worth it, however. I ended up logging hundreds of hours of tape with the Uyghurs and with local Syrians, who offered multi-faceted and unvarnished views of their new foreign neighbors. Eating Uyghur-style naan bread and mutton-fat samsas in northern Syria, I could have closed my eyes and imagined myself back in Xinjiang, a decade before. Who could have imagined my years in China would have led me to this dry patch of hilly, Syria?
The reporting raised bigger questions than I had anticipated when I began trip planning. What would happen to the Uyghurs now that the war was over? Many were putting down real roots: buying land, building houses, enrolling their children in Syrian schools. And yet their stated dream remained fighting their way back to China, a prospect in many ways even more implausible than when the Uyghurs first moved to Syria. It remains taboo to discuss permanent settlement in Syria.
The other question I was left contemplating is the perverse power of trauma. One father observed the difference he saw in his Syrian-born Uyghur children and his children who had been born in China. The former were much calmer and extroverted than his Chinese-born children, having experienced far less state control and ethnic discrimination, he surmised. Yet, predictably, the cause of Uyghur independence from China also burned less bright for his Syrian-born children, who had never laid eyes on Xinjiang. The Uyghurs’ shared suffering and their painful memories of home created an enormous sense of unity that let them survive a punishing war but transmitting that collective sense of tragedy to the next generation of Syrian Uyghurs will grow increasingly challenging.
The time I spent in Syria became an integral part of my book, Our Hearts Burned for Home. I hope that readers of this book remember the winding, unexpected path the Uyghurs I wrote about took to get to Syria. Their story is one with few, if any, uncomplicated “good guys.” I am not asking readers to take sides but merely to empathize: trauma and war have a terrible way of forcing individuals to choose between bad and worse options. This story I hope gives the Uyghurs and Syrians caught up in conflicts bigger than the ones of their own making some agency and voice.
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Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria’s Civil War by Emily Feng is available from Columbia Global Reports.