Some 20,000 Uyghurs have put down roots in Syria, originally drawn by the fight to oust former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In the meantime they are running bakeries, building homes, and enrolling their children in Arabic-language schools.
But their future is uncertain, as a landmark NPR investigation revealed last month. Not only are the ethnic Turkic Muslims reckoning with the tensions of living among Syria’s already volatile mix of ethnic and religious minorities. China is also pressing Damascus to deport them back to China, while the fighters themselves say they have no intention of leaving and no country to return to.
China fears Uyghurs in Syria could one day bring the fight they waged to oust its ally Assad to China itself, said Mamatjan Juma, executive director of the Uyghur News Network.
“China always worried that removing a sitting government by force would happen to them as well,” Juma told MBN.
Uyghurs are now the largest contingent of foreign fighters in Syria, and the outsized role they played in bringing down the Assad regime make it difficult for Syria’s government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former rebel leader, to abandon them. Indeed, while Beijing wants all Uyghurs in Syria extradited, Sharaa aims to reward them for their loyalty and utility to Syria’s fledgling military.
Origins of TIP in Syria
China casts the Uyghur fighters and their Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria as the same organization as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a group with al-Qaeda and Taliban affiliations that China considers a terror organization. East Turkestan is the term Uyghurs use for the Chinese province of Xinjiang
Sean Roberts, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University, says that connection is more tenuous than the Chinese portray it.
“While there is evidence that there remains some movement of TIP members between Afghanistan and Syria, the organizations in both countries no longer resemble their predecessors,” Roberts told MBN. “Generally, they do not appear to share any cohesive organizational structure even if they maintain communications.”
TIP fighters arrived in Syria after the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, traveling through Central Asia and across the porous Turkish-Syrian border before settling in opposition-held territory in northwestern Syria.
Roberts said TIP’s involvement in Syria pushed the Uyghurs toward a more nationalistic worldview, deemphasizing jihadism.
“TIP in Syria started adopting a more nationalist oriented ideology around the same time that HTS did, which is further evidence of their close relationship,” he said, using the abbreviation for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the militant organization under which Sharaa spearheaded the ouster of Assad. Roberts added the shift came after the TIP “became less reliant on funding tied to the international jihadist movement.”
Juma said China frequently brands Uyghurs as terrorists to discredit them and pressure the governments that host them.
“China always wants to portray [the Uyghurs] as terrorists because it’s a convenient way to blacklist or just delegitimize their legitimate grievances against the Chinese government,” Juma said.
Fighters or Refugees?
Some Uyghurs joined the fight in Syria to gain the military experience they believed they would need to one day take control of Xinjiang, or East Turkestand, from the Chinese government. They eventually joined Syrian Islamist opposition groups.
But Roberts said many other Uyghurs came to Syria not as fighters but as refugees after China’s repression of the Muslim minority escalated in the wake of 2009 riots in Urumqi, the largest city in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
“In many cases, they came to Syria not as fighters, but because they were guaranteed housing and schools for their families in what was a growing Uyghur community in the country,” he said.
The July 2009 Ürümqi riots erupted when a Uyghur protest over the killing of factory workers in Guangdong turned violent, leaving roughly 200 dead and sparking a sweeping crackdown on Uyghurs across Xinjiang.
Uyghur linguist and writer Abduweli Ayup, who traveled to Syria and interviewed Uyghur militants, told MBN that many of these Uyghurs believe their experience in Syria shaped their vision for East Turkestan’s future.
A Uyghur fighter told Ayup that Syria had taught him how nations are built; how governments are organized, how constitutions are written. Beyond those institutional lessons, Ayup said the fighter emphasized what he had learned from fighting alongside people of different ethnicities, religions, and ideologies.
Had they returned from Afghanistan directly to East Turkestan, the fighter said, they would have found themselves in conflict not only with the Chinese government but with their own people, because their ideas at the time were too extreme, too far removed from what ordinary Uyghurs needed or wanted, and incompatible with democracy.
Life in the Shadow of Beijing
Ayup said Uyghurs face several challenges in Syria, including fear of speaking out about Chinese repression.
“The main problem is that Uyghurs cannot tell their story. They’re afraid because of government pressure,” Ayup said, noting that few were comfortable with being interviewed at all. They also worry about retaliation against family members still in China, he said, as well as Chinese pressure on the Syrian government to extradite Uyghurs.
Still, Roberts said many Uyghurs see Syria as their future.
“In the present moment, most Uyghurs in Syria view the state as their new place of residence. They feel free from persecution in the new Syrian state and are able to pursue their lives and their faith without state interference unlike their previous lives inside China,” he said.
A Cautious Reset
Beijing engaged cautiously with the new HTS-led government after Assad’s ouster. Syrian and Chinese officials did not engage diplomatically—at least publicly—until two months after Assad fell.
The public centerpiece of Chinese policy toward the Sharaa government has been the Uyghur fighters in the Syrian military. Beijing’s stance echoed its early one after the Taliban first took control of Afghanistan in 1996, when it refused to establish diplomatic relations because of the presence of Uyghur fighters there.
Roberts expressed doubt that the Uyghur issue is insurmountable for Chinese-Syrian relations. “It is likely that both Syria and the new Taliban government in Afghanistan are providing guarantees to China that Uyghur groups in their respective countries will not pose any direct threat to the People’s Republic,” he said.
November Developments
That dynamic played out clearly in November 2025, when Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani visited Beijing. Counterterrorism cooperation topped the agenda, with Shaibani promising that Syria would not be used as a launchpad for actions against Chinese interests.
In response, China reopened its embassy in Damascus and pledged 380 million yuan in aid to Syria.
That same month, China registered the sole abstention on a UN Security Council vote delisting President Sharaa and Interior Minister Anas Khattab from the ISIS and al-Qaeda sanctions list. Fu Cong, China’s permanent representative to the UN, said Syria needs to “take decisive measures to prevent terrorist acts, and address the threat posed by foreign terrorist fighters, including East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) members in Syria.”
Shortly after, Agence France-Presse reported that Syria intended to hand over 400 Uyghur fighters to China. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, citing sources in the Syrian Foreign Ministry, denied any such agreement existed.
The security dispute hasn’t stopped Chinese firms from testing the Syrian market, with investment increasing through 2025. In May 2025, the Chinese company Fidi Contracting signed a 20-year memorandum of understanding to invest in industrial zones in the country. These economic ties remain modest and seem likely to stay that way for now.
Sharaa appears to be aiming to secure Beijing’s money and diplomatic weight without a rupture with the fighters who put him in power. It is unlikely, however, that China will drop its demand for the return of the Uyghurs, one it has maintained unerringly vis-a-vis the Taliban for two decades.