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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
