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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."

The author claims that the playbook has been in use for 25 years, but its roots go back further: Gene Sharp was in Beijing in 1989.
https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/war-other-means

IDEAS: Where have you seen your theories in action?

SHARP: We did some of them ourselves in very simple ways as undergraduates, at lunch counter sit-ins in Columbus, Ohio. I was in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania when their independence-minded governments were trying to exit the Soviet Union. I met with government leaders in all three countries, and they drew heavily on a book of mine that we then had the English page proofs of, called ''Civilian-Based Defense." I was also in Tiananmen Square with a friend of mine.

Walk through a square. Any square. From Belgrade in 2000 to Bucharest in 2025.

You will see the same things in the photographs. Young people. Clean visual branding in a single color. A simple symbol you can paint with a stencil. A name in two or three words that means “resistance” or “enough” or “it’s time.” Posters everywhere. Stickers everywhere. T-shirts with the same logo, often handed out for free.

The crowd is large but disciplined. Music. Theatre. Humor that mocks the regime rather than confronting it head-on. Foreign journalists are abundant. Foreign observers are abundant. Western politicians arrive with cookies or speeches and the cameras find them.

Then the crisis trigger. A disputed election. A contested verdict. A tragedy that becomes a symbol. A claim of fraud that must be answered immediately, on the street, by occupation, not in the courts and not at the ballot box.

You have seen this picture before. The faces change. The slogans change. The branding stays surprisingly consistent.

This is not coincidence. It is a method.

The method has a name in Western academic literature. It is called “nonviolent civic resistance” or “people power” or sometimes just “civil society.” In the literature of the targeted governments it is called “color revolution” or “hybrid warfare.” Both descriptions point at the same observable phenomenon.

This article is not about whether the method is good or bad. That question depends on whose side you are on, which is exactly the question the method tries to make you stop asking. This article is about the method itself. The mechanics. The seven recurring elements. Where they came from. How they have been applied. And why they are starting to fail.

Who Pays For It

The method is free. The mobilization is not.

The Seven Recurring Elements

Element 1. The youth movement with branded identity.

Element 2. The crisis trigger.

Element 3. The square.

Element 4. The election or court verdict as the inflection point.

Element 5. The Western chorus.

Element 6. The neutralization of the security forces.

Element 7. The choreographed handover.

What Has Changed

The playbook is no longer working as reliably as it did between 2000 and 2014. Several things have changed.

The targeted governments have studied it. Russia spent the years after the Orange Revolution building a counter-color-revolution doctrine. China studied the Soviet collapse for thirty years and applied lessons systematically after 2003. Belarus, after the 2010 protests, restructured its security services and information environment around the recognition that the playbook was an external strategy. Venezuela survived multiple attempts. Iran survived 2009. Even Serbia, ironically, learned. Aleksandar Vucic, the president since 2017, has held his ground through multiple waves of street pressure including the 2024 to 2025 wave.

The funding has been disrupted. The USAID restructuring in early 2025 removed a major funding stream for the NGO network. National Endowment for Democracy budgets have been challenged. The Open Society Foundations remain active but more visible than before, which is a problem for an operation that depends on appearing local.

The legitimacy has been damaged. After Ukraine 2014, after Libya, after Syria, after the Arab Spring’s wreckage, the global South has become widely skeptical of the “democracy promotion” frame. The same techniques that were celebrated in Belgrade and Tbilisi are now suspected on first sight.

The information environment has changed. The narrative monopoly the Western media enjoyed in 2003 no longer exists. RT, CGTN, Al Jazeera, TeleSUR, and a vast ecosystem of independent and adversarial outlets now provide parallel accounts of what is happening on the ground. Targeted governments can document what they see as foreign interference and reach a global audience without needing Western platforms.

And, ironically, the playbook itself has become so familiar that simply pointing at it disarms it. Vucic in Serbia openly calls the protests a “color revolution.” That framing alone has been enough to keep half the Serbian population uncertain about the motives of the protesters, regardless of whether the protests are genuinely organic or not.

The playbook has not disappeared. It is still being deployed. Belarus 2020 was a classic attempt. Hong Kong 2019 to 2020 was a classic attempt. The 2024 to 2025 wave in Serbia and Georgia were attempts. But the success rate has dropped sharply.

If the playbook is failing, why is it still being used?

What This Means For You

This article does not argue that every street protest is a foreign operation. Most street protests are organic. Most people who go to a square are there because they are genuinely angry about something real. The playbook does not invent grievances. It harvests them.

The question of who the removed leaders were is not the question this article asks. The question is what was done, by whom, with what method, and with what funding.

Regime change is regime change. The label “color revolution” is the label given to it when the West likes the outcome. The label “coup” or “foreign interference” is the label given to the same operation when the West does not. The mechanics are the same. The funders are the same. The trainers are the same. The only thing that changes is which side wins the narrative battle for what the operation is called.

What the article argues is something narrower. The method exists. It is documented. It is reproducible. It has been applied across a quarter-century with a consistency that is statistically improbable for organic phenomena. And it has been treated by Western media, throughout that period, as if each case were unrelated to the others.

For the reader, the question is not whether to support or oppose a given protest movement. The question is whether the language being used to describe the movement, in the moment it happens, will turn out to map cleanly onto the seven elements of the playbook.

If the youth movement appeared on cue, with full branding, three months before the trigger.

If the square was occupied within hours of the trigger, with infrastructure that took weeks to plan.

If foreign embassies were visibly engaged within days.

If the Western media narrative was synchronized across outlets within hours.

If the security forces became the subject of psychological operations designed to demobilize them.

If a replacement government was being discussed in foreign capitals before the existing one had finished resigning.

If all six of those things appear together, the playbook is being run.

Whether you support the outcome it is trying to produce is a separate question.

Closing

The method is open. It has been documented for half a century. The handbook is online. The training centers operate publicly. The funding flows can be traced.

What is hidden is not the method. What is hidden is the recognition that the method is being used.

The hardest part of breaking a magic trick is not learning what the magician did. It is accepting that the trick was a trick at all. People resist that step because acceptance feels like a kind of self-criticism. If the trick fooled me, what does that say about me?

Nothing. It says the trick was good.

Pull the camera back. The frame around the frame is the actual story.

What does the frame around your next protest look like, from there?

What caused the American Revolution? Let's dive beneath the surface-level understanding of British tyranny and unjust taxation and try to understand the long-term social, political, and economic forces which set the stage for our War of Independence.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.today/NytYP

As the leaders of the United States and China met in Beijing on Thursday, Xi Jinping had a much older rivalry on his mind.

The Chinese president invoked a warning from the Classical world, when the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta went to war, saying that the United States and China should beware the “Thucydides Trap” in their own relations.

Mr. Xi cited the concept, popularized in recent decades, as he warned that Beijing and Washington could enter an “extremely dangerous place” if President Trump sought to impede China as it asserted itself over Taiwan.

The trap referred to by Mr. Xi was named for Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general, whose account of the Second Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.) is considered one of the first written military histories.

In it, Thucydides argued that the war between Athens and Sparta was driven by the threat posed to an established power by one gaining strength. “The rise of Athens frightened Sparta and forced them into war,” wrote Thucydides. (The precise translation is contested among classicists).

For some scholars, the war — and the explanation offered for it in that ancient passage — presaged nearly every major conflict to follow. The international relations theorist Graham Allison dubbed it the “Thucydides Trap” in the early 2010s.

“The idea is that when an established, great power is met with a rising power, conflict between the two is certainly likely if not inevitable,” said Daniel Sutton, a classicist at the University of Cambridge who studies Thucydides, on Thursday.

In Mr. Xi’s version of the analogy, an emboldened China is the Athens to an American Sparta.

To demonstrate his theory, Professor Allison identified 16 times in history that a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. According to his tally, which is subjective, 12 of the 16 rivalries ended in a conflict.

This month-old instance has three communities. One is for testing and the other two are anti-trans.

Room 641A, which housed the “Big Brother machine,” inside AT&T’s Folsom Street building in San Francisco, California.

On January 20, 2006, the front doorbell rang at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s offices on Shotwell Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. At the time, Shotwell Street wasn’t the glamorous part of the Mission. Our offices sat between two auto repair shops, across the street from a utility substation.

[I]t was with friendliness but some caution that our executive director, Shari Steele, answered the bell.

“Do you folks care about privacy?” the guy asked. He was in a tan trench coat, looked to be in his early 60s, with gray hair, intense eyes, and a raspy voice.

“Why yes, we do,” Shari answered.

“Then I have some information for you. I am a retired AT&T technician. I know how the NSA is tapping into the internet at an AT&T facility downtown.”

“Well, come on in.”

Shari found EFF attorney Kevin Bankston in his tiny office. They talked for a long time. After the man left, Kevin and Lee Tien, another EFF attorney, burst into my office.

“This guy named Mark Klein, who just came to the door, has something,” Kevin said, with more excitement than I had seen from him in a long time. I was immediately intrigued, but what they told me blew past my highest expectations. Mark had presented us with unequivocal evidence that the National Security Agency was engaged in mass, untargeted spying in the U.S. by tapping into the internet backbone. And it was doing this from an AT&T building just a short distance from our offices.