MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Syria's civil war dragged on for more than 13 years before dictator Bashar al-Assad fled. His regime collapsed suddenly, precipitated by a lightning strike from a group of rebel forces. Fighting alongside Syrian rebels were thousands of foreign fighters. NPR's Emily Feng spent over a month interviewing dozens of them, and she has the story of their unlikely journey to Syria.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: More than a decade ago, thousands of ethnic Uyghur fighters born in China started trickling into Syria. Uyghurs are a primarily Muslim Turkic ethnic group, and many were fleeing what human rights groups have termed a cultural genocide under the Chinese government. NPR spoke to more than 40 Uyghur fighters and their families, and most say they came to Syria to learn how to fight, and they were not too picky about who taught them. Here's the Uyghur senior commander Choghtal. Like all the fighters in this piece, he wanted to use only his first name because he fears the Chinese government will arrest his family in China.
CHOGHTAL: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Choghtal says they did not come to Syria to wage war, neither against the Assad regime...
CHOGHTAL: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: ...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-Shughur.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
FENG: This battle became so central to the story of the Uyghur fighters in Syria that I asked Abdulhey, a battalion commander, to walk me through what happened.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
FENG: Abdulhey is hulking in his military dress, 6 1/2 feet tall and fluent in Syrian Arabic. We treked up a hill that overlooks the city of Jisr al-Shughur with him.
ABDULHEY: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: 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.
ABDULHEY: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: He says he planted his feet, stood right in front of a regime tank...
ABDULHEY: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: ...And fired two shoulder-launched antitank missiles. But what Abdulhey 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 Nurmemet, another fighter.
NURMEMET: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: But Nurmemet credits the Uyghurs' anger and how the Chinese government persecuted their community for giving them a stubborn courage.
NURMEMET: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: He 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. China's foreign ministry and State Council did not respond to an NPR request for comment.
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 plains around it. This allowed an alliance of Sunni militias there, later called Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, to build up its power base. Today, HTS' former leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is Syria's leader.
AARON ZELIN: In many ways, they're some of the most battle-hardened folks.
FENG: This is Aaron Zelin, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has followed the Uyghurs' rise in Syria.
ZELIN: They'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.
FENG: In moments of peace, the Uyghurs say they studied American and British infantry tactics, and they won battles...
CHOGHTAL: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: ...Becoming effective enough that in September 2024, Choghtal says they were invited to a war council. It was called by Syria's rebel leader, al-Sharaa, and he asked for their help to take Aleppo, a major Syrian city. That's when Hobayd, the Uyghurs' top strategist, had an idea.
HOBAYD: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: 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. In 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.
HOBAYD: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Hobayd shows me the tunnel today, hidden behind piles of rocks and olive trees. Uyghur fighters had to ride tiny motorcycles they'd adapted to fit in the narrow two-mile long tunnel.
HOBAYD: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Months later, as Hobayd crouches inside the tiny dark tunnel, he savors the memory.
HOBAYD: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: "Our 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.
CHOGHTAL: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: But Choghtal, their commander, says he was overcome by one thought only - why could this not be his hometown or other cities back home? The Uyghurs had helped Syria's rebels in their goal to overthrow the Syrian regime, but their own goal of taking control of their homeland from China seemed as elusive as ever.
Emily Feng, NPR News, Jisr al-Shughur, Syria.
KELLY: And Emily's reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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