The foreign fighters who helped topple Assad — and why China worries about them

Hobayd, a senior commander of the Uyghur militants in Syria, crouches in a strategic tunnel used during the 2024 offensive against then-President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Emily Feng/NPR

Emily Feng/NPR

One unit of soldiers wearing oxygen tanks stationed itself in the poorly ventilated tunnel, which at points was less than a yard high. A second unit lay in wait in olive groves facing Aleppo.

At dawn, the unit in the tunnel emerged behind regime troops, while the second unit hit from the front, causing the government troops to scatter in panic. Meanwhile, other rebel units from various militant groups began attacking Aleppo itself. Within days, Syria's once-largest city was in rebel hands.

"We remained steadfast. Miraculously, all the brothers who charged into death itself came out alive," remembers Hobayd, 31, the commander of the unit inside the tunnel. He recalls the weeks that followed when they chased army soldiers all the way to Syria's capital, Damascus. "Every one of us survived and witnessed the liberation of Syria."

A man in Aleppo, Syria, on Dec. 8, 2024, holds Syrian opposition flags as he celebrates after Syria's army command notified officers that Assad's 24-year authoritarian rule had ended, following a rapid rebel offensive that took the world by surprise. Karam al-Masri/Reuters

Karam al-Masri/Reuters

Just over a week after Aleppo fell, Syria's recently toppled dictator, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia: "From Aleppo, our way to Damascus was clear," adds Hobayd.

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.

"They've been some of the key fighters that have been associated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham prior to the fall of the [Assad] regime and had an outsized role" in the civil war, says Aaron Zelin, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "In many ways, they're some of the most battle-hardened folks [in Syria]."

Yet the secretive Uyghur community in Syria has not agreed to grant interviews — until now. Over the course of a month, more than 40 fighters and their families spoke to NPR.

In the rebel-held north, they rapidly established themselves as highly disciplined and effective fighters who would take on tasks that other rebel groups failed to accomplish. Their role in critical battles in the country's nearly 14-year-long civil war helped Sharaa, Syria's current leader, cement enough power to eventually push out the Assad regime.

In gratitude, the new Syrian government this year integrated the largest Uyghur militia into the reconstituted Syrian National Army and appointed several Uyghur commanders as officers within the new defense ministry. There is talk of giving some of the Uyghurs Syrian citizenship.

Despite their clout within the new Syrian government, the Uyghurs' position in Syria is tenuous. Some Syrian Arabs view them and other foreign fighters with suspicion and fear.

Meanwhile, China has ramped up.) diplomatic pressure on Syria to expel the Uyghurs. For much of the last quarter century, Beijing has considered all Uyghur militants abroad as terrorists and has repeatedly accused Uyghur movements of inspiring or instructing thousands of terrorist attacks, some deadly, inside China over a three-decade period.

This photo taken on May 31, 2019, shows a facility believed to be a reeducation camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

Chinese authorities have also cracked down on Uyghurs at home, in the Xinjiang region. Starting in 2017, authorities began sending hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs to "reeducation camps," where they were taught Mandarin and forced to memorize Chinese leader Xi Jinping's speeches, according to human rights organizations. Others were placed under house arrest, harassed or subject to extensive surveillance, or had their passports confiscated, according to prior NPR reporting and the findings of the United Nations and rights groups. In 2021, the U.S. labeled China's campaign a "genocide" aimed at eradicating Uyghur identity. Beijing slammed that decision and has defended the detention camps as a necessary facet of a wide-ranging de-radicalization effort in the region.

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China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has for now refused to lift terrorism sanctions on Syria, arguing that the country's government must first deal with its Uyghur fighters.

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.

Nurmemet, a Uyghur militant, went to Syria to learn how to use arms after encountering what he described as extreme repression against Uyghurs in China. Emily Feng/NPR

Emily Feng/NPR

"Our boys, because of their deep and overflowing hatred toward the Chinese — their resentment had grown so intense — they had this stubborn courage, fearless of death, pure-hearted and determined," says Nurmemet, 40, a Uyghur fighter. "The Syrians explained the oppression they had suffered — how they had been tormented by Bashar al-Assad's regime. We thought: If we could first rescue these people from this oppression … perhaps Allah would one day rescue us from China's oppression as well."

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and China's cabinet, the State Council, did not respond to questions submitted by NPR in the preparation of this story.

"They drove us out"

A former Uyghur fighter in Syria looks at a Uyghur-language map of the world, which depicts the region of Xinjiang as a separate country, rather than as a part of China. Emily Feng/NPR

Emily Feng/NPR

In a villa inside a walled compound in the Syrian countryside, Choghtal, 36, deputy commander of the Uyghurs in Syria, recounted how he decided to leave his family and his life behind in China to join a war in Syria.

Choghtal is diminutive and has the manner of someone more suited to an office than a battlefield. He had been a star student in high school and hoped to study chemistry or physics. But he says he rethought his future after July 5, 2009, when police aggressively dispersed Uyghur students protesting in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi. The students were demanding that authorities investigate a factory brawl from the prior month in southern China, in which two Uyghur men were allegedly beaten to death by ethnic Han workers. The Han are China's largest ethnic group, and they constitute the majority of its population.

The police's alleged heavy-handedness while dispersing the crowds unleashed a violent Uyghur rampage against police and Han civilians on the streets of Urumqi, instigating, in turn, Han reprisals on Uyghurs, who then fought back. From his hometown in southern Xinjiang, Choghtal says, he watched in horror as the spiral of violence unfolded, from the videos his friends in Urumqi sent him.

Uyghur women grab a riot police officer as they protest in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, on July 7, 2009. Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

The Chinese government estimates that the riots killed at least 192 people, about two-thirds of them Han. Uyghur rights advocates claim thousands of Uyghurs may have died. Hundreds of mostly young Uyghur men were arrested in the ensuing security crackdown. Choghtal began looking for ways to leave the country.

"If I had not left China, I would have died in prison," he says. "They forced me to leave. They drove us out."

Aspects of his story were echoed by the Uyghur fighters and their families whom NPR interviewed in Syria. In their interviews, the Uyghurs described decades of Chinese state repression and state controls that they say led them to believe armed resistance was the only viable way to protect their rights.

People walk past burned-out cars and buses in a street in Urumqi on July 6, 2009, following deadly rioting. The violence in Urumqi on July 5, 2009, involved thousands of people and triggered an enormous security crackdown across Xinjiang, where tensions have long simmered amid Uyghur claims of repressive Chinese rule. Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images

"Can slogans alone free [my family]? Can I liberate them by mere words or empty statements? China will not stop just because we complain," says Yasir, 37, who is from the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar.

Some of the older fighters described losing their faith in the efficacy of political activism after Chinese government crackdowns following Uyghur uprisings in 1990, against state-mandated birth control policies, and again in 1997, in protest of a state security campaign.

But most of the Uyghurs in Syria, even those who had been educated within elite Chinese institutions, say the events of July 2009 made them lose faith in China's stewardship of the region and galvanized them to take up arms.

"So many tensions have erupted between Uyghur and Han people, and we used to be colleagues, but after July 5, Han people looked at us [Uyghurs] with scrutiny, as if any one of us would pick up a knife and stab you, which hurt my heart greatly," Guli, a Uyghur doctor in internal medicine, remembers telling one of her Han Chinese supervisors in Xinjiang. She says persistent ethnic discrimination made it impossible for her to do her job well. In the years afterward, her husband became a fighter in Syria and she trained as a war surgeon.

The only way to regain that dignity, according to Uyghurs like Choghtal, was to train to fight and perhaps have the opportunity one day to wrest control of Xinjiang away from the Communist Party.

"We are in fact a nation of our own, that we once had a glorious history and that we were not originally a humiliated or oppressed people. It only became so after the Chinese came and conquered us," says Choghtal.

The fighters say they felt that the Chinese government's policies had to be met with equal brutality and left them no alternative but to take up arms.

"The reason we came here today, taking up arms in foreign lands, the reason we walk with death next to us — China is responsible. China forced us into this," says Moaz, 55, a fighter.

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.

Establishing a stronghold

Fighters from a coalition of Islamist forces burn a portrait of Assad on May 29, 2015, in the Syrian city of Idlib, the second provincial capital to fall from government control. Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images

Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images

During the heady early days of the rebellion against Assad, Uyghur fighters in Syria say, at first they tried to distance themselves from taking sides in the civil war.

"We did not come to Syria to wage war, neither against Bashar al-Assad nor anyone else," says Choghtal, the deputy commander."Our original goal from the beginning was military training."

The Uyghurs say they first sought out training in Aleppo but struck out farther west with their families toward a small city called Jisr al-Shughur, partially motivated by the need for more housing as their ranks swelled. Hungry for battlefield experience, they were also not too picky about whom they trained with at first. Rebel groups, equally hungry for fighters, weren't too selective either.

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Uyghur officers describe how they were pulled — inevitably, they say — into what ended up being a more than 13-year-long civil war between rebel and regime forces in Syria. In the spring of 2015, Syrian military forces bore down on Jisr al-Shughur, which sits at a strategic juncture along a majorhighway.

The Uyghurs initially managed to repel them, but the military force regrouped and attacked a second time using tanks and artillery. The force came within several dozen yards of Uyghur positions.

"Before entering battle, no matter how brave a person may be, there is always fear. Every human feels it. Anyone who says otherwise is lying," says Abdulhey, a Uyghur commander in the battle.

It took another month of bloody fighting to definitively push Assad's forces out of Jisr al-Shughur. That won the Uyghurs a reputation among Syrian rebel groups for being organized, motivated soldiers. From then on, the Uyghurs largely based themselves in Jisr al-Shughur and in several surrounding villages that they recaptured from government forces. Most still live around there today.

As devout Sunni Muslims, many Uyghur fighters sympathized with the largely Sunni Islamist militias, especially those that became part of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an alliance of militia groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, which until 2016 was affiliated with al-Qaida. Hayat Tahrir al-Shamwas seeking to establish a stronghold in northern Syria. Most Uyghurs in Syria affiliated themselves with a broad movement called the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), which once also had a presence in Afghanistan.

To learn how to fight, former TIP fighters described working and training alongside the Sunni fighting group Ahrar al-Sham and other Sunni groups that later became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. To arm themselves, the Uyghurs say, they used weapons seized from regime forces and say they also funded themselves through donations from the Uyghur diaspora and businesses they started in Syria.

Uyghurs in Syria were not completely united at first; some fighters in Syria say that at least hundreds of Uyghurs split off to join ISIS.Analysts who followed Syria's civil war and militant groups in the region say ISIS was at one point a serious political rival to the more nationalist TIP.

ISIS "was a big issue," says Jerome Drevon, a former senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who has closely followed Sunni militant groups in Syria. TIP then had "to differentiate themselves" from ISIS' fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and had "to tell the people, not only would you disagree with [ISIS] politically, but even religiously, this is not our way."

For years, TIP manned arduous front-line battle posts, safeguarding a long stretch of rebel-held territory in the north while enduring heavy bombardment from Russian forces aligned with Assad. Former TIP fighters recall that working 20-day shifts at the front line was so grueling that they did not have time to take their shoes off. In their spare time, former TIP officers say, they closely studied the doctrines of the U.S., Syrian, German and British armies, which, they say, helped them reform their own disciplinary and fighting standards.

In September 2024, TIP was among several rebel groups called in for a meeting by Sharaa in the border town of Bab al-Hawa. They agreed to join forces to preempt a planned regime offensive by attacking Aleppo. When Aleppo fell in late November, in part due to that tunnel operation that cut off the regime's supply lines, the rebel groups made a split-second decision to continue the offensive.

"When dawn broke, they retreated. After that, we reorganized our groups and continued moving forward" all the way to Damascus, remembers Nuredin, 30, one of the TIP commanders in the offensive.

On Dec. 8, 2024, the Uyghurs were among the soldiers marching into Damascus and the coastal city of Latakia. Ecstatic Syrians threw candy and flowers at them, the Uyghurs say.

Choghtal says the scenes of joy transported him into vivid fantasies that they were back home in Xinjiang and that the Syrians embracing them were their own relatives.

"If only it were Hotan, or Aksu, or Urumqi, I thought. Whenever I picked up my weapon, that was the thought that came to my mind," says Choghtal, naming various cities in Xinjiang.

To stay or go

Paper and cardboard facsimiles of a tank and artillery made by Uyghur children in a Uyghur-language school in northern Syria. Emily Feng/NPR

Emily Feng/NPR

After nearly 14 years of fighting, the Uyghurs in Syria say, they are eager to build new lives for themselves in Syria. They want to preserve Uyghur culture and practice Islam free of state restraints in Syria. They have expanded communally run businesses importing cars and operating gas stations and have established several Uyghur-language schools, though many children have opted to enroll in local, Arabic-language Syrian schools and public universities.

Today, the Uyghur community in Syria numbers around 20,000, including women and children, according to senior commanders, and they hope to entice more diaspora Uyghurs to move to Syria.

Mary, a Uyghur mother and the wife of a Uyghur commander in Syria, stands with her youngest child in front of their home. Emily Feng/NPR

Emily Feng/NPR

Having backed Sharaa and the militant group that the current president once led, Uyghurs have been rewarded with senior appointments in the country's defense ministry. A large number of former TIP fighters, the largest Uyghur fighting force, have been folded into Syria's reconstituted national army, say Syrian defense officials and Uyghurs.

In a statement to NPR, Syria's defense ministry said that the Uyghurs in Syria "pose neither an internal nor an external threat, but rather adhere to what ensures Syria's security and stability." It went on to add: "Their integration into the [Syrian] system serves the interest of protecting Syrian sovereignty and preventing anxiety in their countries of origin."

But two issues hang over the Uyghurs' continued presence in Syria.

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.

During the war, Uyghur fighters had commandeered houses, many of them abandoned, in historically Shiite and Christian communities.

Denise Khoury, standing inside the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Latakia, says she checked on her mother's home in northern Syria after the war and found it occupied by foreign fighters. Emily Feng/NPR

Emily Feng/NPR

Christians like Denise Khoury, 75, returned at the end of the fighting to check on their ancestral villages innorthern Syria, only to find their homes occupied by Chechen, Moroccan and Uyghur fighters.

"We [Christians] cannot live alongside Uyghurs or other Sunni Muslims anymore. … They are opposed to our way of life. They see us as infidels," Khoury says.

After months of negotiation among the new Syrian government, Uyghur officers and Christian leaders, Uyghurs have started handing back some of the land and houses they had occupied in several mostly Christian villages.

Most Uyghurs whom NPR spoke to say it was the right thing to do.

"No matter which religion or group someone belongs to, their security must be guaranteed. They have the right to demand their legal property," says Bilal, 36, a fighter.

China and ideology

Uyghur officials say the second — and biggest — threat to their continued presence in Syria is China. In November, China agreed to reopen its embassy in Damascus but once again raised the issue of Uyghur fighters. "Syria has pledged not to allow any entity to use Syrian territory to undermine China's interests. China appreciates this promise and hopes that Syria will take effective measures to implement it," said Wang Yi, China's foreign minister. Beijing also abstained from a November 2025 U.N. vote on a resolution dropping sanctions on Sharaa, citing its concerns over "foreign terrorist fighters" in Syria.

The U.S. listed a Uyghur militant group, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), as a terrorist organization in 2002 in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. China says ETIM is behind many violent attacks on Chinese soil.

The U.S. removed this classification on ETIM, however, in 2020, as relations between the U.S. and China nose-dived during the first Trump administration. China labeled the move politically motivated. The organization is still sanctioned by the United Nations, the United Kingdom, Japan and New Zealand, among other countries.

Most Uyghurs in Syria once belonged to the recently disbanded TIP and deny involvement with ETIM or any attacks on Chinese civilians.

"Why would we target civilians? They are human beings as well and have the right to live," says Choghtal, the deputy commander. "We have no quarrel with normal civilians. Let them live. We are fundamentally against such actions."

Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former coordinator of the U.N. team that monitored counterterrorism sanctions until 2022, says he never saw evidence directly linking Uyghurs in Syria with violence in China. "Never once did I see a claim, even from China, that this person in Afghanistan or that person in Syria was in touch with this person in China, who then shot this police officer or set off that explosive device," says Fitton-Brown.

The Uyghurs NPR spoke to say they are more moderate than other Uyghur armed groups, especially ETIM, which trained with al-Qaida and the Taliban in the 1990s in Afghanistan and Pakistan. At nearly 4,000 fighters in Syria, they are certainly more numerous than other Uyghur militant groups, and they helped Syria's new leader, Sharaa, notch important battle victories.

A handful of TIP's earliest members in Syria came from ETIM camps in Afghanistan, but analysts who track Islamist groups say the two are functionally independent today.

"There is a divide between the two branches, the one based in Afghanistan … and the Syrian branch, which is now totally different," says Riccardo Valle, an independent researcher of extremist groups.

However, China maintains that all Uyghur militants are ideologically united and that fighters in Syria take orders from a sanctioned Afghan-based, al-Qaida-affiliated Uyghur leader named Abdul Haq.

"I don't have a clear answer, I'm afraid, on that particular question," says Colin Smith, the current coordinator for the United Nations' monitoring committee, noting conflicting reports from U.N. member countries.

Fitton-Brown says most Uyghur fighters in Syria were largely recruited from embittered Uyghur exiles who had never been to Afghanistan or Pakistan. "There wasn't movement back and forth between Syria and Afghanistan. It's not easy and not common," says Fitton-Brown.

Experts say the Uyghur groups in Syria were, for the most part, focused on narrow goals and ought to be viewed as a religiously inspired nationalist liberation movement. "They just care about their cause in China," says Drevon, the former International Crisis Group analyst.

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."

In the meantime, he says, he has put the community's focus on self-strengthening and education. His officers say they are studying the Zionist movement. "Whatever [the Jewish people] needed to do, they did, restored their unity and built a state," says Abu Mohammad, 39, another fighter. "If we also strengthen ourselves from every side, like they did, I believe we could build a state — perhaps even stronger than the one they built."

And while they will always consider Xinjiang their homeland, they say they have shed enough blood in Syria to count it as a home as well.

On the outskirts of Jisr al-Shughur, high on a hill, among green shrubs lie the graves of hundreds of Uyghur fighters who perished fighting the Assad regime. The last man was buried here in December 2024.

A makeshift cemetery in northern Syria has the graves of hundreds of the more than 1,000 Uyghur fighters who were killed fighting alongside rebel groups during the Syrian civil war. Uyghur commanders say many of their fighters died under Russian bombardment. Emily Feng/NPR

Emily Feng/NPR

Anas, a Uyghur fighter, points to the grave of a close friend, the white gravestone blinding against the rusty-red soil common to northern Syria. Like many Uyghurs, he says, his friend died from Russian bombardment during the Syrian war. At the foot of his gravestone are three smaller plaques: of the men who died trying to bring his body back from the front lines.

Many of the gravestones in this makeshift cemetery have no full names, only the fighter's nom de guerre, because they were buried in the haste of war.

"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."

Jawad Rizkallah and Abduweli Ayup contributed research from Idlib and Jisr al-Shughur, Syria.

This reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.