The foreign fighters from China that played a key role in Syria’s revolution

0:00New shows, new music, new movies, keeping up with pop culture sometimes feels like a full-time job. Thankfully, over at Pop Culture Happy Hour, it's literally our job. We break down what's actually worth watching, listening to, and pretending you already knew about. So the next time someone says, did you see that? You can say, yeah, obviously. Follow NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts. Today on State of the World, the foreign fighters from China that played a key role in Syria's revolution. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening.

0:41I'm Greg Dixon. Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic minority in China, numbering about 12 million. Human rights groups accused China's government of oppressing Uyghurs, fearing their behind militant attacks. NPR's Emily Fang reported extensively on Uyghurs for almost a decade while she was based in China. In 2017, when China began an ongoing campaign detaining and imprisoning historically Muslim ethnic minorities. On today's episode, we're going to hear about thousands of Uyghurs who ended up in a very different place, in Syria. Waves and waves of Uyghurs went to Syria to fight in that country's civil war as a way to gain battlefield experience.

1:24And this group played an important role in the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2024. So, are these freedom fighters, or are they the now battle-hardened militants China always feared? Emily Feng brings us their story. And just a note, you're going to hear the sounds of gunfire. I met some of the foreign fighters as they headed to a training camp. Part of a standard three-month curriculum held on a dusty, sun-baked Syrian field. Now standard for all Uyghur militants here in Syria. They have come a long way from their home, the Xinjiang region in China, or as the Uyghurs call it, East Turkestan.

2:09At about 4 ,000 fighter-strong Uyghurs made up the largest contingent of foreign fighters who battled the Assad regime. They are a Turkic people, primarily Muslim, and spread out across the Asian continent. Human rights groups have accused the Chinese government of persecuting them. The first Trump administration also labeled this persecution a genocide, because human rights organizations say that beginning in 2017, the Chinese government began detaining and jailing hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, mostly without due process. China justified this mass detention in part because Beijing believes thousands of attacks, some of them deadly, over a three-decade period were inspired or coordinated by Uyghur militants abroad.

2:57Uyghur militants like this man. What is your name? I'm Moaz. Moaz. Like all the Uyghurs in this piece, he requested that NPR only use his first name because he fears the Chinese government will arrest his family members who remain in China. We met Mawaz at a tea house by the Turquoise Orontes River in northern Syria. He and the four dozen Uyghur fighters and their families who NPR spoke to have never given media interviews before. Now, 55 years old, Mawaz says for years he thought peaceful dissent could win Uyghurs more rights in China. But during an 11-year prison stint for publishing banned history books and pamphlets, Moaz says Chinese guards once beat him for several days in a row.

3:48And that was when Moaz decided words would never change the Chinese government's policies.

3:56The world might call us terrorists, but it was China who taught us what terror means, Moaz says. Coming to war-torn Syria was an act of desperation, and picking up a gun? A last resort, he says. The same is true for 36-year-old Chogtal, now one of the most senior Uyghur commanders in Syria. We met Chogtal in his closely guarded villa. Wearing a periwinkle polo, he gives off a professorial air. He says his political awakening came from devouring books on Uyghur history. From the books, he says he learned the Uyghurs had not always been oppressed, that they'd once had their own kingdom and then state.

4:40That is, until nearly 80 years ago when China annexed the western region of Xinjiang where most Uyghurs live. But then came a day when Chogdhal says history became real for him, July 5th, 2009.

4:56Uyghur protests devolved into fatal riots between China's ethnic Han majority and Uyghur residents in Xinjiang. Choktal says he watched the protests from afar, and then his Uyghur friends started to disappear, among the estimated thousands of mostly young Uyghur men who human rights groups believe China arrested in the aftermath. And when he fled China, it was a departure so hasty, he says he never said goodbye to his family. The vast majority of Uyghur fighters and peer interviewed say they also left, losing hope for change in China after those deadly riots in July 2009. And like most of them, Chokdal says he first headed to Turkey, where there was an already established Uyghur diaspora.

5:46But Turkey would not recognize his university diploma from China or give him papers to stay. So Chokhtal says he easily slipped across the border into Syria, where a full-blown civil war had already begun. And that's when many Uyghurs realized they could not only find refuge in Syria, but also being in Syria could teach them how to fight. And they learned to fight in these three-month training camps. But the Uyghurs always kept their overarching goal in mind, fighting China for independence. One Uyghur who goes by the name Abu Zuhair tells NPR, as long as he still has breath in his body, he is prepared to fight the current Chinese government, to free Uyghur prisoners, and ultimately establish an independent Uyghur state.

6:35China's foreign ministry and state council did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. But China has called these Uyghur fighters terrorists, linking them to other sanctioned Islamist groups. And some of the earliest Uyghur militants in Syria did train first with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and some Uyghurs in Syria even joined ISIS. The Uyghurs NPR interviewed in Syria deny China's terrorism allegations and any ties to these groups. Jerome Drevin is a researcher at the Center on Conflict Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva. He's embedded for months with Syrian rebels, wrote a book about them, and met several Uyghur fighters.

7:12He says China's characterization of them is incorrect. To see them as linked to al-Qaeda only means we see them through this internationalist angle of an armed group fighting Western countries to liberate the Muslim world. Drebin says that's just not what the Uyghurs in Syria stand for. They are much closer to just a national liberation movement. Liberation from Chinese rule.

7:41Chogdhal, the commander, says they did not come to Syria to wage war, neither against the Assad regime, nor against Syrians. They just wanted military training, so they could one day wrest control of their ancestral lands from the Chinese government. But their first real battle chose them. In the spring of 2015, Assad's forces were bearing down on the Uyghur hideout in northern Syria, near a city called Jisr al-Shagor. This battle became so central to the story of the Uyghur fighters in Syria that I asked Abdul Hay, a battalion commander, to walk me through what happened. Abdul Hay is hulking in his military dress, six and a half feet tall and fluent in Syrian Arabic.

8:28We trekked up a hill that overlooks the city of Jisr al-Shagor with him. And he describes how the Uyghurs fought off Syrian forces, sometimes with homemade mortars. One night, under the light of a full moon, his unit came under direct attack. He says he planted his feet, stood right in front of a regime tank, and fired two shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles. But what Abdel Hay says he remembers most are the injuries of a fellow fighter and seeing his blood pooling blue and black in the silver moonlight. Real war has its own brutal terror, says Nurmagomed, another fighter. But Nurmagomed credits the Uyghurs' anger and how the Chinese government persecuted their community for giving them a stubborn courage.

9:19He says they thought, if we can rescue Syrians from the Assad regime's oppression, then perhaps God would one day rescue us from China's oppression. For the next five years, the Uyghurs fought in grueling shifts of 20 days at a time, protecting the Syrian city of Idlib and the strategic planes around it. This allowed an alliance of Sunni militias there, later called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, to build up its power base. Today, HTS's former leader, Ahmed al-Shara, is Syria's leader. In many ways, they're some of the most battle-hardened folks. This is Aaron Zelen, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and who has followed the Uyghurs' rise in Syria.

10:03They've been some of the key fighters that have been associated with HTS prior to the fall of the regime and had an outsized role. In moments of peace, the Uyghurs say they studied American and British infantry tactics, and they won battles. Becoming effective enough that in September 2024, Chogtal says they were invited to a war council. It was called by Syria's rebel leader Al-Shara, and he asked for their help to take Aleppo, a major Syrian city. That's when Hobaid, the Uyghurs' top strategist, had an idea. Months before, the Uyghurs had discovered an abandoned sewage tunnel. So he says he assembled a special forces unit carrying oxygen tanks that would use the tunnel to get behind enemy lines on the road to Aleppo and cut off the regime's supply lines.

10:55In late November, the rebel offensive kicked off, and the Uyghur fighters used that tunnel to ambush government forces and capture a key road junction, paving the way for the rebels to take Aleppo. Hubay shows me the tunnel today, hidden behind piles of rocks and olive trees. Uyghur fighters had to ride tiny motorcycles it adapted to fit in the narrow, two-mile-long tunnel. Months later, as Hubay crouches inside the tiny, dark tunnel, he savors the memory.

11:29Our victory started here, he says. After Aleppo, the Uyghurs made their way south. And on December 8, 2024, Uyghur and Syrian rebel forces entered the capital, Damascus.

11:44But Chogtal, their commander, says he was overcome by one thought only. Why could this not be his hometown or other cities back home? Since that victory, Uyghurs have tried to make a life for themselves in Syria. Take this bakery off the side of a road in this hilly village. It's turning out heaps of meat-stuffed buns. Maybe a samsa? Called samsas. And naan, a kind of flatbread beloved by ethnic Uyghurs. We're in northern Syria, but the food is straight out of Xinjiang, the Uyghur's homeland, which is now a big chunk of modern-day China. Ethnic Uyghur fighters and their families that fled China have settled here.

12:26For more than a decade, they fought and trained with Syrian rebel fighters, part of a dream that they might one day learn how to fight the Chinese government and win independence of their homelands from Chinese control. But now that the Syrian civil war is over, some 20 ,000 Uyghurs are putting down roots in Syria, running businesses like that bakery, building homes, and setting up Uyghur language schools like this one, where about 300 elementary-age children attend. Nearby, I meet Mary. She's the wife of a senior officer. She wants her children to be multilingual, fluent in Uyghur, but also Arabic and English.

13:09Four of her five children were born in Syria, and she says she hopes they will not just be fighters, but also perhaps diplomats or doctors.

13:22But the Uyghurs face an uncomfortable reality here in Syria. They say they felt marginalized within China, but in Syria, the tables have turned. Many Arab Syrians perceive them as foreign occupiers, and some Syrian religious minorities view them as Muslim extremists. But the Uyghurs say their biggest threat is still China. Beijing has pressured Syria's new leadership to deport them. China has accused Uyghur groups of fatal attacks on Chinese soil since 1990. Chogtal, the Uyghur senior commander, denies these allegations. China is so strong economically and militarily, He and the fighters and peer interviewed say they believe attacking China is unrealistic, even foolhardy right now.

14:07He wants to build a community of Uyghurs right here in Syria.

14:20When the Friday call to prayer sounds nearby, he excuses himself to pray. And when he returns, Chogdal lays out his vision for his people. He believes the past decade spent in Syria has been useful. They have become a formidable fighting force.

14:40But Uyghurs cannot win independence in China with Kalashnikov rifles by arming ourselves alone, he says. Uyghurs' hearts and their minds also must be liberated through education and from contact with the outside world.

14:57Syria has become the one place Chokdal says Uyghurs can preserve their identity, use their language, and save their culture. Liberation, Chokdal says, doesn't mean just picking up a gun. And because the Uyghurs fought alongside Syria's current rulers and helped them win the civil war, the Uyghurs now have political influence. They're part of the new national army. There's talk of giving Uyghurs in Syria Syrian citizenship. In a statement to NPR, the Syrian defense ministry said integrating the Uyghurs into their system, quote, serves the interest to protecting Syrian sovereignty and preventing anxiety in their countries of origin.

15:34And the Uyghurs also believe they deserve a place in Syria today because they have sacrificed so much here. The cost is evident here. High on a hill on the side of a dirt road are the graves of hundreds of Uyghur fighters who perished fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. A fighter named Anas points to the grave of a friend, the white stone bright against the red soil. At the foot of the gravestone are three smaller plaques, the names of three men who died trying to bring his friend's body back from where he'd fallen on the front lines. Anas' fighting and dying like this so far from home was not their first choice.

16:20We had hoped to be buried in the soil of our homeland, he says. His hope now is his children will not have to wander foreign lands forever. Emily Fang, NPR News, Idlib, Syria. This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

16:42That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.