A journey from cheerful musician to fighter. China may call it radicalization. I see it as part of a generation’s religious awakening.
kok Bayraq, Bitter Winter
01/15/2025
In August 2023 at an event in Sefaköy, Istanbul, I ran into an old friend, a village-fellow from my hometown called Qasımjan, whom I had not seen for thirty years. I hugged him tightly and asked: “Did you fall from the sky, or did you spring from the earth?” “I came from the inside,” he answered.
I knew that in Sefaköy the word “inside” meant “Syria.”
I never thought Qasımjan would go there. Because he was a cheerful and playful boy who played the accordion and sang beautifully at weddings and parties in our hometown. There was also an interesting story on how he became an accordionist. He had fallen in love with a beautiful girl in our district. Since he knew that the girl loved listening to the accordion, he spent all his savings to study music at the art school in Gulja for two years. He achieved his goals both in school and in love.
In the 1990s, after graduating with honors, he was appointed as a music teacher in a middle school in a rural area. Eventually, he found the village boring and gave up teaching. With his “expensive” girlfriend, he went to work in Guangzhou, a port city in China, and I lost track of him.
We talked for three days, counting and remembering the neighbors and friends in our village. “Our friends Bolus Seriq, Iskender Shota, Imam Kangshar, and a total of 47 people died from heroin. This is the death toll in a small village of about 1,500 people with 250 families. If you calculate regionally, you come across a frightening number. The government did almost nothing to prevent this tragedy.”
I knew how hard heroin had hit the Uyghur people from Radio Free Asia’s reports on drug addiction victims. Some Uyghur activists believe that China’s turning a blind eye to drug addiction is part of the genocidal methods that began in the 1980s. Some consider the damage as serious as the casualties of a war.
The topic I focused on most was Qasımjan’s experience in Syria.
“How long did you stay in Syria?” “Ten years.” “You are still alive!” “True, a high hill where we were doing defensive duty was flattened by Russian bombs, but we are still alive. God forbid, it was not an easy thing to part with this life.”
When he described his impressions from the first weeks in Syria, he reported: “When I went to register for the frontline, the officer in charge asked how much I had studied. I said I had completed primary school.” I asked, reminding him of the years he studied music: “Why didn’t you say you had finished college or high school?” “To avoid being rejected for the frontline. Because the well-educated got administrative jobs.” “So, were you all in a hurry to get to the frontlines of the battlefields?” “Yes, sometimes we could not fit in the vehicle, there were times when we had to run after the vehicle and climb inside.”
His enthusiasm in the face of the risk of death was impressive. I went on asking: “Were you running to death?” “We were running to learn how to hold a weapon quickly!” “But what were the factors behind this eagerness?” He left my question unanswered and looked at me in the eyes with the meaning of “Even if I don’t say it, you should know.” Yes, he was right, as a Uyghur and an observer, as a victim and a witness of the tragedy of the defenseless situation of this people for decades, I know this very well. There is other strong evidence of this enthusiasm in the “Xinjiang police files.” 24-year-old Zumret Tursun was detained because she said, “If someone can take me to Syria, I will marry him even if he doesn’t have a penny.”
I asked the same question with different words: “Could it be that all of you have the same motivation to come to Syria?” “We Uyghurs are generally people affected by the same political environment, genocide, but there are different specific motivations and reasons that bring each of us to Syria.”
I still wonder how he transformed from a cheerful musician into a warrior (mujahid), because in my mind these two professions, one life-taking and the other life-giving, required very different attitudes. “What was the starting point of your changed lifestyle?” “As you know, Meshrep [traditional Uyghur gatherings] started in Gulja since 1995. During my participation, I listened to a powerful sermon and became a completely different person. I withdrew from all entertainment activities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I changed overnight…”
From that day on, Qasımjan started to pray and focused more on his garment shop. His business went well, and automatically his circle of friends changed completely. I know that the Meshrep movement was started in Ghulja to control drug use and that it was successful to a certain extent. This success increased the devotion to religion in society. This change alarmed the Chinese authorities and led to the February 5 Ghulja Incident.
“We went to Friday prayers with my new circle of friends, we chatted secretly at home. These were very meaningful conversations… There was no more tasteless laughter, meaningless chatter like before, we listened to sermons, look at forbidden news, analyzed the provisions in state documents… Finally, we have chosen the path of fight. We are in Syria now…”
When he talked about the change in his lifestyle, he was very happy with himself. Not only his face was smiling but also his eyes and voice manifested joy. “Can you tell me a few sentences from those meaningful conversations you had during that period?” “Once, in that Meshrep sermon it was said: What does the government want from us the most? To dance non-stop, to continue drinking alcohol, to keep using drugs, to gamble all night long, right? If we don’t save ourselves, we will die! Therefore, we must do the opposite, the only way to do this is to hold on tightly to our religion—Islam—, to be a perfect Muslim.”
In the Xinjiang Police Files, there are many cases of detainees accused of religious radicalism because they stopped dancing and playing music at weddings. “Did you abandon the accordion as part of your transformation when you heard the sermon?” I asked. “I was not inclined to play it due to my lack of inspiration and tight work schedule in those days.” “Didn’t your ‘expensive’ girlfriend get mad at you when you took your distance from the accordion?” “No, she was the first to support my change, because at that time we were already married and had two sons. Before that, she was also annoyed by my excessive social activities, mostly of an entertainment nature, complaining that I didn’t focus much on the family.”
The personal social reform he described was very familiar to me through my own direct family experience. One of my three younger siblings, Obulqasim Hoshur, and his wife Rahile, died of drug addiction in 2007. Learning from this tragedy, my two youngest siblings grew up deeply religious. Their example transformed my older brother, my mother, and my sisters from weak Muslims to staunch Muslims.
Qasımjan also described the secret preparations he made for his trip, the arguments he had with his relatives, the mountains and rivers he crossed on the way, each of which was enough material for a novel. Here is a detail: “When I secretly said goodbye to my relatives, my aunt started crying so that I would give up on my trip to Syria. She said, ‘You can go to heaven by spending your travel budget on orphanages here.’ I said, ‘There are people who can do the charity work you mentioned; but I am moving on to a different field; I will avenge our brothers who died in this new opium war waged by China against us through drugs.’ She stopped crying at once and prayed for me, because she also had a son who had died from heroin, and she believed that China killed him.”
Finally, I asked: “Where is your ‘expensive’ girlfriend now?” “In Syria.” ‘How did she get used to Syria, where there is no accordion?” “There are three accordionists at home right now, she’s busy,” he laughed, referring to himself and their two children.
He came to Syria in 2013 with his wife and two sons, aged 20 and 18. His wife is currently taking care of three grandchildren in Jisr ash-Shughur City of Idlib Governorate where Uyghur communities reside.
His and his wife’s life journey can be blamed by China, as always, to religious radicalization. In my view, it is the picture of a generation’s religious awakening after decades of communist destruction. It took place to protect the Uyghurs’ national existence from assimilation and genocide by China.
