The plan was daring: Under cover of night, an elite group of forces would ambush Syrian government soldiers and cut off strategic supply lines supporting the regime-held northern city of Aleppo.
These elite fighters were not from Syria. They were Uyghurs — a largely Muslim ethnic minority long persecuted in China. And when the offensive kicked off one night in November 2024, they went to work.
This is the story of how the Uyghurs, a Turkic and predominantly Muslim ethnic minority spread across Central Asia but concentrated in China's far-western Xinjiang region, eventually became the largest contingent of foreign fighters in Syria.
Many of the 40-odd Uyghur fighters and their families that NPR spoke to for this story — all of whom requested that they be identified by only their first names to protect remaining family members in Xinjiang from reprisals by Chinese authorities — say they fled to Syria and fought the way they did because of their deep hatred of the Chinese government.
They say they now hope to preserve their culture and perhaps one day raise an army powerful enough to seize control of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as the Uyghurs call it, the region that the Uyghurs consider their homeland and that the Chinese Communist Party took control of in 1949.
He and most other Uyghurs first headed to Turkey, home to a large Uyghur diaspora community. But many Uyghurs were unable to secure residency documents in Turkey and feared deportation to China. In 2012, they began trickling into northern Syria through Turkey's largely porous southern border.
There in Syria, around the northern city of Idlib, a loose coalition of thousands of Uyghurs and their families began to settle down.
Many Syrian Arabs oppose the continued presence of foreign fighters, including the Uyghurs, in Syria. Outside Idlib, most Syrians have never seen or met a Uyghur fighter before, and the conservative Sunni Muslim beliefs held by many Uyghurs in Syria have scared Syria's minority communities.
Given China's economic and military strengths, Choghtal and other Uyghur fighters NPR interviewed say that despite their ardent desire to turn their attention to China, attacking it is unrealistic, even foolhardy, and they need to bide their time. "We believe the Communist Party of China will collapse one day, just like we believe in the sun and the moon," Choghtal says. "And then we will be ready."
"Even if it takes until the end of our lives, if only we could return to our homeland, liberate it and live there. To be buried in the earth of our homeland — that is what we dream of," Anas says. "We do not want our children to wander in foreign lands all their lives. Even if we ourselves cannot achieve it, if we open this path, then maybe one day our children can."