‘They told me not to speak out’: the woman who took on China – and won her husband’s freedom

After fleeing Chinese repression, Uyghurs Idris and Zeynure Hasan thought their family would be safe. But Beijing’s growing influence led to Idris’s arrest and a long battle to be reunited

Z

eynure Hasan was at home in Istanbul in July 2021 when her husband finally called. 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.