Emily Feng is the author of “Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria’s Civil War.”
In December 2024, Syrian rebels streamed into Damascus in a surprise attack that toppled President Bashar al-Assad and put an end to more than 13 bloody years of civil war. Among them were hundreds of Uyghur fighters. A video filmed during the attacks shows a Uyghur commander standing, masked and heavily armed, inside a Syrian mosque. In Arabic, he criticizes the presence not of Assad in Syria, but of the Chinese Communist Party in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where Uyghurs make up nearly half the population.
Half a year later, when I sat down with him, the commander — clothed in khakis and a periwinkle polo — turned out to be a cerebral, slight man, a former standout student in China. Only the scars on his arms gave away his years on the Syrian front lines.
“I never decided to leave East Turkestan,” the commander, Choghtal, told me, using Uyghur nationalists’ name for Xinjiang. “They forced me to leave. They drove us out.”
By “they,” he means China, which fears these Uyghur fighters. Beijing labels them terrorists and separatists, and it cites their existence as one of several reasons for the mass detentions and arrests that since 2017 have ruptured Uyghur society in Xinjiang. Prior to reporting in Syria, I had spent nearly a decade reporting in Xinjiang and beyond about the devastating sweep of this crackdown.
Still, I was shocked to find so many Uyghurs in Syria, so far away from China. But in speaking with Uyghur fighters and their families there, I came to understand the connection between repression in China and the conflict in Syria — and why this group of people felt they had no choice but to pick up arms.
When I asked these Uyghur fighters why they had left China, almost all pointed to the ugly race riots in Xinjiang in 2009, during which ethnic Han and Uyghurs killed one another. Peaceful coexistence seemed impossible afterward, and in the wave of arrests and disappearances of Uyghurs that followed, many Uyghurs said they lost hope for a better future in their homeland.
Some first tried to head to Turkey, where a large enclave of Uyghurs already exists. But when they could not secure residency documents, they began to settle in Syria. Now, as many as 20,000 Uyghurs — men, women and children — live there.
Their involvement in the civil war didn’t begin with commitment to the Syrian resistance. Rather, Uyghurs told me they felt they had no choice other than to learn how to fight — perhaps one day if the CCP ever weakened its grip on Xinjiang, they would have the chance to take back their home. In Syria, they sought out military experience with whoever would train them. Settling in northern Syria, where rebels were solidifying an enclave, the Uyghurs quickly earned a reputation among the groups in need of fighters, and they later became essential to the toppling of the Assad regime.
Armed, Islamist Uyghur nationalist groups have long existed, dating back to the late 1990s in Afghanistan, but the Uyghurs in Syria quickly outstripped them in size, influence and ability. The choice to take up arms is controversial, even among Uyghurs, and it has made the Uyghur fighters polarizing figures. That includes in Syria, where they are still considered outsiders and are feared by religious minorities who see them as part of the new Sunni majority.
After the deadly 2009 riots, China felt under threat. However, Beijing’s response — draconian security controls and repression of most expressions of Uyghur identity — exacerbated the country’s ethnic tensions. In effect, Beijing’s policies sped up the creation of its worst fear: an armed, well-trained militant organization set up with the explicit goal of independence for Xinjiang.
Still, China is a massive, powerful country of 1.4 billion people; it has the second-most powerful army in the world. The Uyghur fighters number roughly 4,000 — China has nothing to fear from them, no matter how well-trained and well-armed they are.
Now the civil war in Syria is over, and thousands of Uyghurs remain. The opportunity to give these Uyghurs a meaningful stake in Chinese society has long passed. China is now trying to exert influence on Damascus to put political controls on the Uyghurs who remain in Syria. But what Beijing can do now is to let the Uyghurs feel like they have a stake in Syria — by giving them the space to build new, rooted lives in the Middle East.
Privately, many Uyghurs tell me that despite their initial hopes, fighting their way back to China now seems even more improbable than it did before coming to Syria. Many believe they will not see Xinjiang again in their lifetimes. Now, they want to become Syrian citizens, to open businesses, to send their children to public schools and to build their own homes.
For better or worse, these Uyghurs now see their future in Syria — and Beijing should let them have it.
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