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In July 2021, Zeynure Hasan was at her residence in Turkey's largest city when she answered a desperately anticipated phone call from her husband. It had been four painful days since their last contact, when he was preparing to board a flight to Casablanca. The silence had been unbearable.

But the update her husband Idris revealed was more devastating. He told her that upon landing in Morocco, he had been arrested and imprisoned. Authorities told him he would be sent back to China. "Call everyone who can rescue me," he said, before the line went dead.

Existence as Ethnic Minority in Exile

The wife, in her early thirties, and Idris, in his late thirties, are members of the mostly Muslim ethnic group, which constitutes about 50% of the population in China's north-western Xinjiang province. Over the last ten years, more than a million Uyghurs are estimated to have been imprisoned in alleged "vocational training camps," where they faced torture for commonplace actions like going to a place of worship or wearing a hijab.

The pair had been among thousands of Uyghurs who escaped to Turkey during the previous decade. They thought they would find safety in exile, but soon found they were mistaken.

"I was told that the Chinese government threatened to shut down all its factories in the nation if Morocco released him," she stated.

After moving in Istanbul, Zeynure worked as an English teacher, while Idris started as a interpreter and designer, assisting to publish Uyghur news and publications. They had a family of three kids and felt free to live as Muslims.

But when one of Idris's close friends, who worked in a library containing Uyghur books, was arrested in the mid-year of 2021, Idris panicked. Reports indicated that Beijing was urging Turkey to deport Uyghurs. Idris felt vulnerable due to his prior arrest, which he believed was connected to his work with activists and supporting Uyghur culture. He decided to flee to Morocco, but Zeynure, whose Chinese passport had lapsed, had to stay behind with the children until her husband could request a visa for the whole family.

A Costly Mistake

Leaving Turkey proved to be a terrible decision. At the airport, border control officials took Idris aside for interrogation. "When he was eventually permitted to get on the plane, he told me how relieved he was that they had released him, but it felt like a set-up to me," Zeynure recalled. Her worst fears were realized when he was removed from the plane and detained by Moroccan authorities.

Over the last ten years, China has been using the global police agency Interpol to target dissidents and had asked for Idris to be placed on the agency's high-priority "alert list." Zeynure claims Turkish officials let him take the flight knowing he would be arrested upon arrival in Morocco.

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

Family Interference

Shortly after learning of her husband's detention, Zeynure received an unexpected phone call from her family in Xinjiang. She had been cut off from her relatives since they visited her in Turkey in 2016 and were imprisoned for several months upon their going back to China.

Her parents had a chilling message. "They told me, 'We know your husband is not with you. Perhaps we can help you,'" she explained. "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 feeding your children,' they told me. 'Avoid saying anything negative about China.'"

But with her husband's safety at stake, the quiet-mannered Zeynure was not going to remain silent. She had been raised seeing women having their head coverings ripped off in open by the authorities and had been resolved to live in a country with freedom of belief.

"Prior to my husband was arrested in Morocco, I didn't do anything. I was just looking after my family; I didn't even have social media or Twitter. But I had to do something to save my husband – I had to tell the reality to the international community. Everyone knows Uyghurs deported to China will be abused or killed. They pushed me to speak out."

Childhood in Xinjiang

Zeynure has two distinct types of memories of her childhood in Xinjiang. The first was of happy days spent in the countryside with her elders, who were farmers. "I used to play with the sheep and poultry. I don't know if I will ever have that type of opportunity again. The relatives around the house and land. It was too beautiful, like a scene from a book."

The second was as a Muslim Uyghur in Xinjiang, of vacations interrupted by mandatory teachings of "political anthems" and being prohibited from attending the mosque or practicing Ramadan.

China claims it is addressing radicalism through 'controlling unauthorized religious activities' and 'training facilities', but other countries, including the US, say its actions amount to ethnic cleansing. Zeynure says she never felt free to follow her religious beliefs in Xinjiang. "Individuals who went on religious journey to Mecca abroad were arrested 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 gave you employment and this beautiful life here'," says Zeynure.

She eventually decided to depart China after returning home from university in another part of China to a increasing crackdown on religious freedoms in 2011. It was then that she was introduced to Idris by one of her classmates. "She knew we both had made the choice to go abroad and told us perhaps we could get together and go together."

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

A New Life in Turkey

Within two months they were wed and ready to leave for a different existence in Turkey. They knew it was an Muslim-majority country with many Muslims and Uyghurs already residing there, with a comparable language and common background. "It felt like Uyghurs' second home," says Zeynure. As a educator and designer, they could also support the Uyghur population in diaspora. "We have many kids now in China growing up without Uyghur culture or dialect so we think it's our responsibility to not let it die out," she says.

But their sense of safety at finding a secure location abroad was short-lived. Beijing has become a global leader in pursuing critics abroad through the use of electronic surveillance, threats and physical assault. But what Idris was subjected to was a more recent tool of repression: using China's increasing financial influence to force other nations to yield to its will, including detaining and extraditing Uyghurs it wants to silence.

Campaigning for Freedom

After the phone call from Idris, and learning he had an Interpol alert against him, Zeynure knew she only had a short window of opportunity to try to stop his extradition to China. She immediately reached out to as many Uyghur advocacy organizations as she could find listed on the internet in Europe and the US and begged for help. She was brave despite China having already demonstrated a willingness to go after the relatives of other individuals.

Zeynure started protesting with her children at the Moroccan embassy in Istanbul, and posting updates on social media. To her surprise, similar protests soon followed in Morocco calling for Idris's freedom. Moroccan officials were compelled to put out a statement saying his extradition was a matter for the courts to decide.

In early August 2021, Interpol withdrew Idris's alert after being pressed to reexamine his case by advocacy organizations. But that did not prevent a Moroccan court later ruling he should still be extradited to China. Zeynure says there was significant political influence from Beijing, which made {little sense|