Mostafa Darwish
July 30, 2017

Egyptian police have arrested dozens of members of Egypt’s Uyghur community, many of whom are students at Al-Azhar University, over the last few weeks as part of a plan to deport them to China, where the students believe that they will be arrested by Chinese state authorities on accusations of belonging to terrorist groups.

The Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority living in a contested northwest region of China, which the Chinese state refers to as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

Some members of the community have managed to leave Egypt, making their way to cities like Istanbul. Others, however, remain in Cairo, in uncertain circumstances.