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In the summer of 2021, a Uyghur woman named Zeynure was at her home in Istanbul when she answered a desperately anticipated phone call from her husband. There had been four stressful days since their last contact, when he was preparing to take a flight to Morocco. The silence had been torturous.

But the information her husband Idris delivered was more alarming. He informed her that upon arrival in Morocco, he had been arrested and imprisoned. Authorities stated he would be extradited to China. "Call anyone who can assist me," he said, before the line went dead.

Existence as Ethnic Minority in Turkey

Zeynure, 31 years old, and Idris, in his late thirties, are members of the mostly Muslim community, which constitutes about 50% of the population in China's western Xinjiang region. Over the last ten years, more than a 1,000,000 Uyghurs are estimated to have been detained in alleged "re-education camps," where they faced mistreatment for commonplace acts like going to a mosque or using a hijab.

The pair had joined thousands of Uyghurs who fled to Turkey during the 2010s. They believed they would find safety in exile, but quickly realized they were wrong.

"I was told that the Beijing officials threatened to shut down all its factories in the country if Morocco freed him," she explained.

After settling in Istanbul, Zeynure became an language instructor, while Idris started as a interpreter and artist, assisting to produce Uyghur media and publications. They had three children and felt able to practice as followers of Islam.

But when one of Idris's close friends, who was employed in a book repository stocking Uyghur books, was detained in the mid-year of 2021, Idris became fearful. News indicated that Beijing was urging Turkey to deport Uyghurs. Idris felt at risk due to his prior arrest, which he believed was connected to his work with advocates and promoting Uyghur heritage. He decided to escape to Morocco, but Zeynure, whose Chinese passport had lapsed, had to stay behind with the children until her husband could apply for a travel document for the whole family.

A Costly Mistake

Leaving Turkey proved to be a terrible decision. At the airport, immigration officials took Idris aside for questioning. "After he was eventually permitted to get on the plane, he told me how relieved he was that they had let him go, but it felt like a set-up to me," she recalled. Her worst fears were confirmed when he was taken off the plane and detained by Moroccan authorities.

Over the past decade, China has been using the international police agency Interpol to target political refugees and had requested for Idris to be placed on the agency's high-priority "alert list." Zeynure says Turkish officials let him take the flight knowing he would be arrested upon landing in Morocco.

What happened next would lead her to do what many Uyghurs fear most: defy China, regardless of the consequences.

Parental Interference

Shortly after learning of her husband's arrest, Zeynure received an unexpected phone call from her parents in Xinjiang. She had been cut off from her relatives since they visited her in Turkey in 2016 and were jailed for a few months upon their return to China.

Her parents had a disturbing message. "They said, 'We know your husband is not with you. Perhaps we can help you,'" she stated. "I realized there must be some authorities there with them and just acted like I didn't know anything. But they persisted and told me not to do anything to help my husband. 'Don't do anything except caring for your children,' they told me. 'Don't say anything bad about China.'"

But with her husband's safety at stake, the softly spoken Zeynure was not going to stay quiet. She had been raised seeing women having their hijabs ripped off in public by the police and had been resolved to live in a country with freedom of belief.

"Before my husband was arrested in Morocco, I didn't do anything. I was just caring for my family; I didn't even have social media or these platforms. But I had to do something to rescue my husband – I had to tell the reality to the world. Everyone knows Uyghurs sent to China will be abused or killed. They forced me to raise my voice."

Childhood in Xinjiang

Zeynure has two distinct types of memories of her early years in Xinjiang. The first was of happy days spent in the rural areas with her elders, who were agricultural workers. "I'd play with the sheep and poultry. I don't know if I will ever have that kind of chance again. The family around the house and farm. It was too beautiful, like a picture from a book."

The second was as a Muslim Uyghur in Xinjiang, of school holidays cut short by mandatory teachings of "communist songs" and being banned from going to the religious site or practicing Ramadan.

China says it is addressing radicalism through 'controlling unauthorized religious activities' and 'training centers', but other countries, including the US, say its actions amount to ethnic cleansing. Zeynure says she never felt able to practice her faith in Xinjiang. "Individuals who went on pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia were detained and sent to prison and told they must have some problem in their brain.

"They aimed for Uyghur people to abandon their faith and culture. They said 'you should believe in us, we provided you employment and this good life here'," says Zeynure.

She finally decided to depart China after returning home from college in another part of China to a growing repression on religious freedoms in 2011. It was then that she was connected to Idris by one of her school friends. "She knew we both had made the choice to go abroad and told us perhaps we could get together and go as a group."

Zeynure says she was right away reassured by Idris. "I saw he was very truthful and shy, and couldn't tell lies or do anything bad. There were some Uyghur boys at university who wanted to marry me, but Idris was unique."

Fresh Start in Turkey

Within 60 days they were married and ready to leave for a new life in Turkey. They knew it was an Muslim-majority country with many Muslims and Uyghurs already living there, with a comparable language and shared background. "It was like Uyghurs' second home," says Zeynure. As a educator and designer, they could also support the community in diaspora. "We have many children now in China growing up without Uyghur traditions or dialect so we think it's our responsibility to not let it die out," she says.

But their relief at locating a place of safety overseas was temporary. Beijing has become a prominent force in targeting dissidents living in exile through the use of monitoring, intimidation and physical assault. But what Idris was faced was a more recent tool of repression: using China's growing economic leverage to pressure other countries to bend to its will, including detaining and extraditing Uyghurs it wants to silence.

Fighting for Release

After the call from Idris, and discovering he had an Interpol alert hanging over him, Zeynure knew she only had a short window of opportunity to try to prevent his extradition to China. She right away contacted as many Uyghur support groups as she could find listed on the internet in the EU and the US and begged for assistance. She was fearless despite China having already shown a willingness to go after the relatives of other individuals.

Zeynure started protesting with her children at the diplomatic mission in Istanbul, and sharing updates on social media. To her amazement, similar protests soon occurred in Morocco calling for Idris's release. Moroccan officials were compelled to issue a statement saying his deportation was a issue for the judicial system to determine.

In the start of August 2021, Interpol cancelled Idris's alert after being urged to review his case by advocacy organizations. But that did not stop a Moroccan court later ruling he should still be extradited to China. Zeynure says there was huge political influence from Beijing, which made {little sense|