Panic is spreading among Turkey’s 50,000-strong Uyghur exile community, survivors of China’s brutal Xinjiang campaign. Without citizenship papers, they dread the knock signaling forced repatriation—and the horrors of re-education camps, beatings, and disappearance that await back home.
Bitter Winter’s investigation reveals Turkey’s shift from ally to adversary. Once a trusted escape route, it’s now a hotspot for capricious raids, deportation scares, and fabricated terror links. Human Rights Watch’s report spotlights this betrayal: non-citizens, especially mothers and kids, are fair game in Ankara’s security sweeps.
Uyghur academic Abdurehim Ayup blew the whistle on 31 community members nabbed by Istanbul’s elite police in a pre-holiday ISIS crackdown. Long-term residents with jobs, they walked free days later sans charges, thanks to activist uproar.
The raid’s cruelest moment involved Muyesser Ali, arrested with her month-old son Enis Abdullah and three other toddlers. The elder kids went home; mom and baby to deportation hell in Izmir. A furious legal and media blitz freed them after seven harrowing days—no justification provided.
Compounding the fear, Chinese diplomats hound Uyghurs in Turkey, demanding intel on fellow exiles via blackmail against homeland kin. Having rebuilt lives with homes, schools, jobs, and Turkish fluency, these families teeter on the brink as geopolitical winds favor Beijing.