"It had been four days since she last heard from him as he got ready to board a flight to Casablanca. The silence had been torturous. But the news Idris now shared with her was even worse. He had been arrested and imprisoned on arrival in Morocco and told he was going to be deported to China. You should call anyone who can help me, anyone who can rescue me, he told her, before the phone went dead."
"Zeynure, 31, and Idris, 37, are Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group who make up about half of the population of China's north-western Xinjiang province. More than a million Uyghurs appear to have been imprisoned in re-education camps and subjected to torture over the past decade for acts as ordinary as attending a mosque or wearing a hijab. The couple had joined thousands of others who fled to Turkey in the 2010s."
"They had three children and felt free to live as Muslims. But when one of Idris's best friends, who worked in a library stocking Uyghur books, was arrested in the summer of 2021, Idris panicked. There were reports that Beijing was pressuring Turkey to deport Uyghurs. Idris felt vulnerable as he had been detained previously, he suspected because of his work with activists and promoting Uyghur culture."
Zeynure Hasan lived in Istanbul with three children while her husband Idris left Turkey for Morocco and was arrested on arrival. Moroccan authorities detained Idris and planned to deport him to China, where Uyghurs face mass detention and torture in Xinjiang re-education camps. Zeynure received a desperate call from Idris asking her to contact anyone who could rescue him. The couple had fled repression and built lives in Turkey; Idris worked publishing Uyghur news and culture. Reports indicated Beijing pressured countries to return Uyghurs, and Idris feared deportation after a colleague's arrest and past detentions. Leaving Turkey to seek safety led to catastrophic consequences.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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