In a dimly lit villa somewhere in the Idlib countryside, Choghtal, a slight, soft-spoken man, admitted that, back home, he had never held a gun. At 36, he is the second-in-command of the largest Uyghur militia in Syria. Growing up in Xinjiang, he was close to his parents and his sister; leaving them had never occurred to him. Then came the summer of 2009.
That June, a deadly brawl broke out at a toy factory in Guangdong province in southern China. The owners had brought in several hundred Uyghur workers; false rumors soon spread among the factory’s nearly 16,000 Han Chinese workers that the newcomers were ill-mannered, petty thieves, prone to violence—and that several of them had raped two Han women. This ignited a frenzy in which more than 120 people, most of them Uyghurs, were injured. The fighting ended only after two Uyghur men were bludgeoned to death.
Uyghur activists wrote open letters to top Chinese leaders asking for an investigation and began boycotting Guangdong products in protest, to no avail. On July 5, dozens of young Uyghurs on the opposite side of the country peacefully gathered in a square in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, demanding a thorough state investigation into the deaths. Many Uyghurs felt that decades of systematic marginalization had fostered a lack of accountability whenever their people were concerned.
Police tried to disperse the students, which sparked a Uyghur rampage against police and Han civilians in Urumqi, instigating a cycle of violence between both ethnic groups that lasted for days. The Chinese government said that 192 people were killed—about two-thirds of them Han—with more than 1,000 people injured. Rights groups have cast doubt on the official death toll.
Uyghur organizations say thousands of Uyghurs, mostly young men, were detained by state security forces and disappeared in the aftermath, though an actual figure is unknown. For the next 10 months, regional authorities ramped up surveillance of Uyghurs, fortified checkpoints, and restricted internet access across Xinjiang.
Choghtal watched videos from his friends in Urumqi—of Chinese police cracking down on student demonstrators and of Han and Uyghur lynch mobs later prowling the streets—and discovered a well of cold fury inside him. He had seen hundreds of his own people peacefully take to the streets. He had seen people who looked like him try to stand up for themselves, only to be disappeared. If he stayed in Xinjiang, he felt that only prison or an early death awaited him. He began looking for ways to smuggle himself out of the country.
Four years later, he found his opportunity. Choghtal snuck across the Chinese border and flew to Turkey. He left without telling his family, unable to face his sister’s sorrow. Choghtal vowed to continue his studies in Turkey and become a doctor. With an education, and by building influence among the Uyghur diaspora, perhaps he could help his fellow Uyghurs back home.
Choghtal began contemplating how the Uyghurs could study China’s own methods in Xinjiang and turn them against the Chinese state. He had to admit a begrudging respect for the Chinese government. “Yes, the regime is our enemy,” he said. “But they did not subjugate East Turkestan in one day; they did it step by step, with strategy and methodical tactics.”
In dozens of hours of interviews, Uyghur fighters and their families were unanimous on one point: They felt that decades of political and cultural repression by the Chinese Communist Party had given them no option but to take up arms. “I never decided to leave East Turkestan,” Choghtal said. “They forced me to leave. They drove us out.”
Tribesmen clear rubble from their destroyed houses following Pakistani military airstrikes against suspected Taliban hideouts in Miranshah in North Waziristan on May 24, 2014.Thir Khan/AFP/Getty Images
The search for a temporary Uyghur homeland outside Chinese control began as early as the late 1990s. Aspiring Uyghur fighters needed a place that was not too picky about passports and residency documents that would give them space to create a community free of Chinese surveillance. Ideally, such a place would also teach them how to organize politically and train militarily.
Uyghurs in Xinjiang first looked to countries on their borders, where Islamist militant movements such as al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan already existed. Abdukerim, a serial entrepreneur who left Xinjiang in 2011, said he first made his way to Waziristan, a remote mountainous region in Pakistan dominated by powerful tribes. He and about a dozen other Uyghur fighters moved from tribe to tribe along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, looking for a militant group that could train them.
They did not have much luck and found conditions inhospitable. The global war on terror was starting to wind down, but Abdukerim and two other Uyghurs who also cycled through Afghanistan and Pakistan during this time described constant U.S. drone surveillance overhead and frequent aerial strikes and bombings. The border was nearly impossible to traverse on foot or by car, and the lack of medical facilities meant fighters who were injured had no place for treatment.
The ideology of the Uzbekistan Islamists and the Taliban was also off-putting to many Uyghurs, who had grown up with the Sufi-inflected forms of Sunni Islam more commonly practiced in Xinjiang. “Their ideology was almost akin to that of ISIS,” said Moaz, 55, a Uyghur fighter who also ended up in Waziristan during this time.
Moaz recalled that the Uzbeks were overwhelmingly focused on establishing a religious caliphate, expelling U.S. forces—toward whom he felt no personal antipathy—from the region, and confronting Israel, an issue he felt also “had nothing to do with” the Uyghurs.
The Uzbek militants he initially lived with also believed it was morally acceptable to kill civilians in war zones, a religious position Moaz considered “cruel behavior.” He kept his objections to himself, however, because he relied on the Uzbeks to ferry him across borders to his intended destination: Syria, where he had heard Uyghur communities were already forming.
In 2012, Abdukerim and about 20 other Uyghurs decided to leave Afghanistan for Syria, where civil war was underway. “We wanted to train in the real world,” he said.
The Uyghurs of Syria effectively formed their own organization, hived off from their predecessors in Afghanistan, with their own political strategies and aims. Most of the Uyghurs in Syria belonged to a group called the Turkestan Islamic Party, but at least a few dozen fighters belonged to two other, much smaller organizations, and all three worked frequently together, often with dozens of other militias and rebel groups, throughout the Syrian civil war.
The Syrian Uyghurs were intentionally nonaligned. And even though an undeniably fundamentalist religiosity structured their community, they leaned toward nationalist, rather than ideological, goals. They sought to create their own state, in their own homeland—not a caliphate, but a nation.
In 2013, Choghtal crossed from Turkey into northern Syria with little but the clothes on his back. There, he glimpsed an alternative future for his people, one in which they were not enfeebled, perpetual victims. He had tried to avoid taking up arms, but decided to resist no longer. A few days later, he began military training.
Over the next three months, he and a few dozen other recruits would go through a rigorous regimen designed by Syrian and Uyghur militant fighters in the Idlib countryside. The Uyghurs who came to Syria had virtually no fighting experience. They had been teachers, farmers, writers, truck drivers, civil engineers, and small-time traders who had sold things like textiles and shoes back in Xinjiang.
“When the first bombs fell down on us, I was so scared. I wanted to hide, but I did not know where to hide,” Bilal, a former hairdresser, said. “But after a while I learned you can guess how far away a bomb is and how long it will take to make contact, based on the pitch and audio profile of the whistle as it comes down.”
A plume of smoke rises above the northern Syrian city of Kobani following a suicide car bomb attack by the Islamic State, seen from the outskirts of Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border, on Oct. 20, 2014.Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images
Despite fighting a foreign war in a foreign land, often communicating in a foreign tongue with other Islamist groups, the Uyghurs learned quickly and leveraged themselves into strategic positions in northern Syria. Through cunning and force of will, they refashioned a motley assemblage of volunteers into seasoned soldiers, learning quickly in the middle of an active war zone, where the cost of failure was death.
On a dry, windswept hill in northern Syria, those costs are evident: There stands a cemetery filled with white stone markers, one for each Uyghur fighter killed in the civil war. “No one wants to die in a foreign land, so far from home,” said Anas, a fighter who ran his own transport company in Xinjiang. “But we feel proud they sacrificed their own lives to liberate this land. One day, somebody will write about them, and it will encourage our nation’s people to live courageously.”
An al Qaeda-affiliated Turkestan Islamic Party fighter fires a rocket at Syrian army positions near Abu al-Duhur Air Base in Idlib, Syria, on Jan. 13, 2018.ZUMA Press Wire/Reuters
By 2014, a serious threat against the Uyghur cause was emerging: the Islamic State. The Islamic State and its affiliate in Afghanistan had been trying to recruit Uyghurs for years, using Islamist language of global jihad to entice foreign fighters eager for action. But most Uyghurs in Syria were unhappy with the Islamic State’s recruiting efforts. They had come to Syria to learn how to build a Uyghur state, not an Islamic caliphate.
There were religious differences as well as ideological ones: Even devout Uyghurs felt the Islamic State was too fundamentalist.
“I saw how they terrorize people and kill civilians. That’s not acceptable,” said Abdallah, a Uyghur fighter in his late 30s. “They sold this story about how they would help Uyghurs and use Islam to create a free and prosperous world, and because some Uyghurs believed them, they were sacrificed needlessly.” Especially controversial was the fact that the Islamic State would kill fellow Muslims.
The disagreements over the Islamic State prompted intense, sometimes violent schisms among the Uyghurs’ ranks. During one hair-raising standoff in 2016, an Islamic State-affiliated group tried to declare a caliphate in rural northern Idlib. About 70 Uyghurs decided to join. When Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the Uyghurs’ main Syrian allies among the rebel groups, moved to storm the caliphate, an Islamic State commander threatened to detonate a suicide vest. A Jabhat fighter shot him dead.
As Jabhat al-Nusra intensified its fight against the Islamic State, it also arrested suspected collaborationist Uyghurs. A few Islamic State fighters made it back to the Uyghur communities in Idlib, but the rifts between family and friends did not heal. “Some of them called their own family infidels,” recalled Ahmad Ziad, a Uyghur religion teacher. “They would say to their own family, ‘I have a bullet waiting for you.’”
The Turkestan Islamic Party needed to act fast. They were hemorrhaging fighters to the Islamic State. “We thought we should have a place to let Uyghurs coming to Syria settle down and live in safety,” Choghtal said. He believed they needed to create their own community, one that allowed Uyghur families to live next to one another and provided social services for women and children. That would make joining the Islamic State less tempting and would strengthen bonds among families, preventing them from splintering into different fighting groups.
Until this point, the Islamic State had been the biggest crisis facing the Syrian Uyghurs. They were still finding their footing in Syria and made it clear they were neutral actors in the region who had no direct conflict with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “We came to Syria only to train militarily,” Choghtal said. “We have nothing to do with the Syrian war.”
But in 2015, the Assad regime’s forces began pushing eastward, threatening the Uyghurs’ base in Jisr al-Shughur. If the Uyghurs were ousted, they would have nowhere else in Syria to go, nor could they return to China. Forced to choose a side, the Uyghurs chose that of the rebels.