From Xinjiang to the Front Lines of Syria

Foreign Policy · Emily Feng · 2026-10-12 09:00 UTC

How Uyghur militants were dragged into civil war.

In a dimly lit villa somewhere in the Idlib countryside, Choghtal, a slight, soft-spoken man, admitted that, back home, he had never held a gun. At 36, he is the second-in-command of the largest Uyghur militia in Syria. Growing up in Xinjiang, he was close to his parents and his sister; leaving them had never occurred to him. Then came the summer of 2009.

That June, a deadly brawl broke out at a toy factory in Guangdong province in southern China. The owners had brought in several hundred Uyghur workers; false rumors soon spread among the factory’s nearly 16,000 Han Chinese workers that the newcomers were ill-mannered, petty thieves, prone to violence—and that several of them had raped two Han women. This ignited a frenzy in which more than 120 people, most of them Uyghurs, were injured. The fighting ended only after two Uyghur men were bludgeoned to death.

In a dimly lit villa somewhere in the Idlib countryside, Choghtal, a slight, soft-spoken man, admitted that, back home, he had never held a gun. At 36, he is the second-in-command of the largest Uyghur militia in Syria. Growing up in Xinjiang, he was close to his parents and his sister; leaving them had never occurred to him. Then came the summer of 2009.

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