In a villa in the Idlib countryside, a 36-year-old man known as Choghtal said he had never held a gun before the events that drove him from China. He is the second-in-command of the largest Uyghur militia fighting in Syria, Foreign Policy reported in an article adapted from Feng's book "Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria's Civil War."
Choghtal said that in June 2009, a brawl broke out at a toy factory in Guangdong province. The factory's owners had brought in several hundred Uyghur workers. False rumours spread among the nearly 16,000 Han Chinese workers that the Uyghurs were ill-mannered, petty thieves, prone to violence, and that several had raped two Han women. According to the report, the rumours ignited a frenzy in which more than 120 people, most of them Uyghurs, were injured. Two Uyghur men were bludgeoned to death.
Following the incident, Uyghur activists wrote open letters to China's leaders asking for an investigation and began boycotting products from Guangdong. Choghtal, who was close to his parents and sister in Xinjiang, said leaving home had never occurred to him before that summer.