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In July 2021, Zeynure Hasan was at her home in Istanbul when she answered a long-awaited phone call from her husband. It had been four stressful days since their last contact, when he was preparing to board a flight to Morocco. The silence had been difficult.

But the information her husband Idris delivered was even worse. He told her that upon landing in Morocco, he had been arrested and jailed. Authorities told him he would be sent back to China. "Call everyone who can assist me," he said, before the line went silent.

Existence as Ethnic Minority in Exile

Zeynure, 31 years old, and Idris, 37, are part of the Uyghur ethnic group, which makes up about half of the residents in China's western Xinjiang region. Over the last ten years, more than a 1,000,000 Uyghurs are reported to have been detained in so-called "vocational training camps," where they faced mistreatment for commonplace acts like attending a mosque or using a headscarf.

The pair had been among thousands of Uyghurs who fled to Turkey during the 2010s. They thought they would find refuge in their new home, but quickly discovered they were wrong.

"Authorities informed me that the Beijing officials warned to close all its factories in the nation if Morocco released him," Zeynure said.

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

But when one of Idris's best friends, who worked in a book repository containing Uyghur books, was arrested in the summer of 2021, Idris panicked. News indicated that Beijing was urging Turkey to deport Uyghurs. Idris felt at risk due to his previous detention, which he believed was linked to his work with advocates and promoting Uyghur culture. He chose to flee to Morocco, but Zeynure, whose Chinese passport had expired, had to stay behind with the children until her husband could apply for a visa for the whole family.

A Terrible Error

Departing Turkey turned out to be a terrible decision. At the Istanbul airport, immigration officials pulled him aside for interrogation. "When he was finally 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," Zeynure recalled. Her worst fears were realized when he was removed from the plane and detained by border officials.

Over the past decade, China has been utilizing the international police agency Interpol to target dissidents and had requested for Idris to be added on the agency's most-wanted "alert list." Zeynure claims Turkish officials let him take the flight aware he would be apprehended upon landing in Morocco.

What happened next would lead her to do what many Uyghurs fear most: challenge China, despite the consequences.

Parental Interference

Soon after learning of her husband's arrest, Zeynure got an unexpected phone call from her parents in Xinjiang. She had been cut off from her family since they came to see her in Turkey in 2016 and were imprisoned for a few months upon their going back to China.

Her parents had a disturbing warning. "They told me, 'We know your husband is not with you. Maybe we can assist you,'" she explained. "I knew there must be some police there with them and just pretended 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. 'Don't say anything negative about China.'"

But with her husband's life at stake, the softly spoken Zeynure was not going to stay quiet. She had grown up witnessing women having their head coverings ripped off in open by the police and had been determined 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 Twitter. But I had to do something to rescue my husband – I had to tell the reality to the international community. Everyone knows Uyghurs sent to China will be abused or die. They forced me to speak out."

Childhood in Xinjiang

Zeynure has different types of recollections of her childhood in Xinjiang. The first was of happy days spent in the countryside 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 type of opportunity again. The relatives around the house and land. It was too beautiful, like a scene from a story."

The second was as a religious minority in Xinjiang, of vacations cut short by forced teachings of "communist songs" and being banned from going to the mosque or practicing Ramadan.

China claims it is tackling radicalism through 'managing unauthorized religious activities' and 'training facilities', but other nations, 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 issue in their mind.

"They wanted Uyghur people to abandon their faith and culture. They said 'you should believe in us, we gave you employment and this good living here'," says Zeynure.

She eventually decided to leave China after coming back home from university in another part of China to a growing repression 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 decision to go abroad and told us perhaps we could get together and go together."

Zeynure says she was immediately comforted by Idris. "I saw he was very honest and shy, and couldn't be dishonest or do anything bad. There were some Uyghur men at university who wanted to marry me, but Idris was different."

A New Life in Turkey

Within two months they were married and ready to move for a different existence in Turkey. They knew it was an Islamic country with many Muslims and Uyghurs already living there, with a comparable tongue and common background. "It was like Uyghurs' second home," says Zeynure. As a teacher and designer, they could also support the community in diaspora. "We have many children now in China growing up without Uyghur traditions or language so we think it's our duty to not let it disappear," she says.

But their sense of safety at finding a secure location overseas was temporary. Beijing has become a prominent force in targeting dissidents abroad through the use of monitoring, threats and violence. But what Idris was faced was a more recent tool of control: using China's growing economic leverage to pressure other nations to yield to its demands, including detaining and deporting Uyghurs it wants to silence.

Campaigning for Freedom

After the call from Idris, and discovering he had an Interpol red notice hanging over him, Zeynure knew she only had a limited time of opportunity to try to stop his deportation to China. She right away contacted as many Uyghur support groups as she could find advertised online in the EU and the US and pleaded for assistance. She was fearless despite China having already demonstrated a readiness to go after the relatives of other targets.

Zeynure started protesting with her children at the diplomatic mission in Istanbul, and sharing information on online platforms. To her amazement, copycat protests soon followed in Morocco calling for Idris's release. Moroccan officials were compelled to put out a statement saying his extradition was a issue for the judicial system to decide.

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