by Aimen Dean
A few days later, Dilay landed in Dubai, greeting me with a gleaming smile, taking off her tinted glasses to reveal eyes that were somewhere between almond and caramel.
‘Aimen, so nice to meet you,’ she said, extending her long fingers to shake my hand with a gossamer touch.
I was awkward and nervous for the first few minutes in her company. I had rarely been solely in the company of a woman. It didn’t help that she was several inches taller than me. But her relaxed, almost careless air quickly put me at ease.
‘So,’ I said when we arrived at one of Dubai’s more exclusive eateries, ‘this is rather a sensitive research assignment. I can’t tell you who the client is, but it will involve us having – shall we say – false credentials.’
She raised an eyebrow and took a sip of sparkling water.
‘Sounds intriguing.’
‘Basically, we need to discover whether the Uighur community is getting involved in militancy, whether some of them are trying to get into Syria, whether there’s a pipeline from China that’s going through Turkey. And who are the organizers?’
‘Should be easy enough,’ she laughed. ‘I have colleagues at my university who may be able to give us some background help – at least steer us in the right direction. And my Turkish is still fluent thanks to Mum and Dad.’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘we will be very careful and deliberate – but I assure you I have done this sort of work before.’
‘So I heard,’ she said, with another raised eyebrow. ‘I don’t know that much but our mutual friend had given me an idea that you were “close to the British” and had “worked with some interesting people”.’
Those long fingers sketched out inverted commas as she spoke.
‘Well, I hardly look like James Bond,’ I said, with the driest delivery I could manage, ‘but I am a better operator.’
I outlined our ‘legend’ for the mission, which made her laugh. She was certainly not easily intimidated.
‘I had better get a Uighur recipe book,’ she said – that charming smile again.
For the next five weeks, Dilay was the consummate researcher, feeding me with details about the areas where Uighurs lived, their mosques and community organizations – and of course their food and restaurants. We chose different family names. I was still apprehensive that her public profile might be a handicap.
We met again at the Istanbul Hilton on a humid afternoon in late June. She wore a hijab with her dark glasses and a long dress favoured by more conservative Turkish women. I almost didn’t recognize her as she glided through the lobby.
She had brought valuable intelligence.
‘I am told,’ she said, as we shared a pot of tea, ‘that the man who knows about the flow to Syria is often at one of the restaurants near the main mosque in Zeytinburnu.’
‘That’s interesting. How do you know?’
‘A friend who’s an academic knows someone in Turkish intelligence. He says there are jihadi tendencies among the Uighurs, but most of their fire is directed at China.’
Zeytinburnu is a crowded, working-class area on the fringes of Istanbul – and home to 90,000 Uighurs by some estimates. Some Turks called it Little Uighurstan, but there are Iraqis, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz communities there, too. It’s truly a Central Asian melting pot.
We went on our first expedition the following afternoon. Dilay was excited and a little nervous, but she camouflaged it expertly. Besides modeling, she had studied drama and had a minor film role. It all helped.
Zeytinburnu certainly did not feel or look Turkish. Old men in Chinese clothes with long wispy beards sat outside cafés, waiting to eat as soon as dusk arrived. Lagman-makers hurled thick wads of noodle in the air prior to chopping them for the saucepan. A pedestrian boulevard was lined with shops selling leather goods; there were enough jackets to supply a division of Hells Angels. Once in a while, we would glimpse the flag of what was known as the East Turkistan Independence movement, a white crescent and star on a mid-blue background. Cheaply printed Turkic newspapers were on sale at kiosks.
Dilay had difficulty understanding the heavily accented Turkish spoken by the Uighurs. We drifted through the neighbourhood, working on our act as culinary tourists, until we came to the mosque. It occupied the ground floor of a nondescript ochre-coloured building dotted with air-conditioning units. Men were beginning to arrive for evening prayers. A few doors away was the Turkistan restaurant we were looking for. It was closed – awaiting the rush of Iftar – but a middle-aged man was sitting outside on a white plastic chair. He told us in halting English and sign language that it would open at 8:00 p.m. And then he switched to near-fluent Arabic and asked what had brought us to Zeytinburnu.
‘I’m in commercial research,’ I replied. ‘We are looking for business opportunities for food importers in Saudi Arabia.’
It was the start of a long conversation that embraced cuisine, culture and the life of the Uighurs. The man introduced himself as Abdul Majeed. He had left China in 1985 because he and his family were marked as troublemakers by the Chinese authorities. He had attended the Islamic university in Islamabad and then moved to Afghanistan for several years when the Taliban were in control, before resuming his northward trek to Kazakhstan.
It seemed we had miraculously stumbled on the very individual the Chinese were most exercised about – the man said to be at the heart of the jihadi pipeline. Dilay’s research was paying outsize dividends at our very first meeting.
‘While I lived in Pakistan I knew many leaders of jihad, including Abdullah Azzam,’ Abdul Majeed said with pride. He had wanted to open a training camp for Uighurs.
‘How long have you been in Turkey?’ I asked as casually as I could.
‘I came here five years ago; I have just received Turkish citizenship. It helps to ingratiate yourself with the ruling party here. I try to make sure the Uighur community are loyal supporters,’ he said with a grin.
Not wishing to push my luck, I said nothing about my own jihadi past: stick to the food, I told myself.
We attended the Maghreb prayers as Abdul Majeed’s guest (Dilay with the women) and then dined at the Turkistan, where we met some of his friends from the mosque. Talk turned inevitably to Syria, then in the third year of its civil war and the stage for an emerging struggle between ISIS and al-Qaeda for the mantle of jihad. We had a long conversation about the ‘suffering of nations’.
Before we parted that evening, Abdul Majeed gave me a list of restaurants we should check out. Happily, several were places Dilay had been advised to visit to meet the ‘right people’.
‘Well, we’re done,’ I laughed to Dilay while in a taxi back to the hotel. ‘Day one, the first guy we meet, and he’s the main man. I had told the client there was a less than twenty percent chance that we’d find him.’
But I also felt uneasy: I had developed a genuine rapport with Abdul Majeed and his friends and had begun to understand the Uighurs’ suffering. I felt uncomfortable at the prospect of telling the Chinese how Abdul Majeed and company were supporting jihad in Syria.
We spent the best part of two weeks travelling Turkey by plane, train and bus – seeking out Uighur communities to the point where we truly were experts in their cuisine. I could easily have written ‘101 Great Uighur Eateries in Turkey’ were there a market for such a book. But we also sought out the most prominent Uighur figures, including Seyit Tumturk – deputy leader of the World Uighur Congress.
We met Tumturk at his home in the city of Kayseri. The place was an industrial powerhouse on the vast Anatolian plain in central Turkey. But it was also home to mosques dating back to the Seljuk era; parts of it were like stepping back into the Middle Ages. Religiously conservative, it has often been described as a clearing house for Uighurs, who make it their first destination in Turkey.
I went through the food routine with Tumturk, who seemed genuinely gratified that someone should care about Uighur cuisine. He invited me to celebrate Iftar at his home, an old and humble place wit
h a large courtyard dripping with grape vines. The muffled sounds of the city drifted through the cool evening air.
Tumturk led evening prayers for a dozen or so men who had come to his house to break the fast. He spoke good Arabic, and I was surprised to hear him pray for the mujahideen’s victory in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
‘And we ask Allah to bestow protection and mercy on Mullah Muhammad Omar, our most noble cleric,’ he concluded.
There can’t be many prayer services in Kayseri, I thought, that end with a prayer for the welfare of the leader of the Taliban. But Tumturk knew his audience. Among them was a young Uighur man who also spoke good Arabic. He told me he had left China two years previously and had spent half the time since with Jabhat al-Nusra – he had only recently returned from fighting in Syria. The young Uighur had been in the area where my nephew Ibrahim was fighting. I took a chance.
‘I guess you never met a young man by the name of Abu Khalil al-Bahraini,’ I asked, using my nephew’s kunya.
He was stunned.
‘Yes, I did – near Saraqib, a week ago.’
‘That’s my nephew,’ I told the assembled Uighurs, and even felt pride in doing so. ‘My family has a long history with jihad.’
I felt still more conflicted. I knew that my nephew had gone to Syria because he thought the struggle against the Assad regime was a noble cause and because jihad there was an important step towards fulfilling the prophecies. Perhaps some of these Uighurs were similarly motivated.
The young Uighur quickly disabused me of the sympathy welling up inside me.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘look at this.’
He flicked open his phone. There was murky footage of him in a room of bare walls and naked light bulbs. A man, kneeling and with his hands bound, came into view. The young Uighur stepped forward and grabbed the back of his head before drawing a large knife across his throat.
He closed the phone.
‘He was a soldier of the criminal Assad regime. We captured him and I executed the pig.’
I am rarely speechless but at that moment could not utter a word. I turned away and said a silent prayer seeking guidance to understand the futility of it all and fervently hoping that my nephew had not descended to such barbarity.
At our second and final meeting with Abdul Majeed in Istanbul we laid out our plan to infuse the Gulf with the best of Uighur food. I then – as subtly as possible – led the conversation towards Syria again. I needed details.
‘Of course we are helping Uighur to reach Syria,’ he said. ‘It is our duty. We have helped about three hundred reach Syria; most are from Turkey but some come from Europe and Canada. We provide guides and money. We have some safe houses.’
‘Who do they join?’ I asked, trying to sound no more than vaguely interested.
‘Mainly Jabhat al-Nusra; a few have gone to the Islamic State. But mainly they want to see the creation of an Islamic Emirate in Syria. They see it as a springboard for creating something similar back home. They want to take the jihad back to Beijing and Shanghai.’
No wonder the Chinese were so anxious.
The mosque where we had prayed was the headquarters for the operation, and Majeed was one of three senior figures who directed it.
I said a reluctant farewell to Dilay in Istanbul.
‘What will you do with everything we found out?’ she asked at our final dinner.
‘I’ll write up a report for my client,’ I replied a little defensively.
By now she had guessed the client was the Chinese government. We were both equivocal about the mission; we had met some good people driven by a sense of injustice to join the rebels’ cause in Syria. Having escaped China, they had rejected an easy life in Istanbul or Kayseri. But some had also taken to bloodletting in Syria with alarming ease.
Over the course of our stay, Dilay had met a lot of Uighur women and warmed to them.
‘I just feel we may have done the wrong thing here,’ she said suddenly. ‘These people really are persecuted in China. But I also know some of them have done terrible things in Syria. Even the wives have execution videos on their phones, and they’re proud of them. And if you talk to them about the Chinese, they just want to kill as many as possible.’
I shook my head; there were no answers.
My report to the Chinese included enough detail to impress and intrigue. I had another call from the perfectly dressed go-between who had met me in Dubai. Would I come to Macau for further discussions?
The Venetian hotel in Macau is one of the most flamboyant and opulent in a place where flamboyance is standard practice.
I arrived in a limousine laid on by the Chinese, flanked by two young intelligence officials who looked more like graduate students from a high-tech institute than counter-terrorism agents. They were deferential to the point of obsequiousness. Clearly, they had been told that I was an important guest. In near-perfect English, they welcomed me to the gambling paradise of the Orient and pointed out various landmarks (all of them built within the last decade) on the way to the Venetian.
They handed me a room key and said I should rest ahead of meeting the head of the counter-terrorism agency and other officials. I did not need to be asked twice; it seemed I had been on the move constantly for months. My suite was so huge that I felt I needed a GPS device to get to the bathroom. But as soon as my head rested on the outsize pillow in the outsize bed, jet lag did the rest.
The following day, I was met by two very earnest men in suits without ties.
‘I hope you are refreshed, Mr Aimen,’ one said. ‘Please, we are going to another hotel to talk and enjoy some hotpot.’
The conversation lasted seven hours, accompanied by near-constant note-taking as I expanded on my written report.
I also took it upon myself to advise a more nuanced approached to the Uighur ‘problem’, suggesting as politely as I could that the exercise of some ‘soft power’ in Xinjiang might yield better results than cracking heads. One of my interviewers sighed.
‘We agree; there are better ways. But the local officials in Xinjiang see only the fist as the way to deal with the Uighurs. They are pig-headed. They also make a lot of money in the process.’
At the end of the marathon briefing, I was asked if I would return to Turkey. I didn’t think it was such a good idea. My new friends in Zeytinburnu might ask when the first orders for Uighur delicacies were expected, or even begin to make enquiries about my Saudi sponsors. The Chinese wanted me to obtain copies of identification papers and passports, which seemed a bridge too far.
My Dubai intermediary also thought that any further missions would invite trouble.
‘They don’t know when it’s smart to stop,’ she confided to me when we met under the chandeliers of the hotel. We’d taken cover in an alcove from the hordes of gamblers, some excitedly hopeful as they entered the Venezia, others crestfallen as they left. ‘You’ve done enough; don’t overexpose yourself,’ she said, ‘but please be very cordial with the head of counter-terrorism.’
I’d almost forgotten; there was yet another meeting. I was struck by a feeling that my extravagant surroundings were small reward for the intensity of the Chinese demands.
I was taken through a series of heavy wooden double doors, through gambling rooms that were ever more exclusive, with marble tables, solid gold chips and carpets that drowned out the ambient noise. There was a Rolex on every wrist and a young woman at every elbow. So these were the gambling halls of the multimillionaires, I thought, where six figures were lost (and rarely made) in the time it took to sink a cocktail.
We entered the cigar room, inexplicably but expensively decked out in tartan. It was so contrived that I nearly began to laugh; I half expected to see Robert Burns in one of the ruby-red armchairs. The walls were panelled in dark mahogany, and the shelves carried luxuriously bound books in English that I assumed had not been touched, let alone read.
I very nearly didn’t see the chief of Chinese counter-terrorism. He w
as barely 4 feet 9 inches tall, a quiet and self-effacing man. I thought he looked like an ancient peasant from the countryside. But the expensive cigar said otherwise. With crashing insensitivity, my hosts offered me a cigar and a single-malt Scotch. I declined politely and asked for a Diet Coke.
The other officials (my hotpot friends) drew up chairs to help translate the chief’s questions. They looked petrified and were clearly in awe of this mandarin. He spoke slowly and softly, pausing to puff on his Cuban cigar.
‘We are very grateful for your help. It is of course not easy for us to get our own people inside the Uighur groups,’ he began. ‘My colleagues say your debrief has been very informative. We see this relationship lasting for many years,’ he added, waiting for the translation to sink in. ‘It’s clear why you were of such value to the British.’
I nodded weakly and thought of the way Dilay and I had stumbled into the Uighur hierarchy in Istanbul. This would not be an auspicious moment to disagree. But I did try out my earlier gambit.
‘I hope my work was helpful. But as I told your colleagues, the best approach would be to address some of the Uighurs’ grievances at root. I would be more than happy to advise on what I would call soft measures to alleviate the situation in Xinjiang and counter extremism.’
As my words were translated, the diminutive chief’s expression hardened. This was not the sort of advice he wanted, even though I had a sense that the translators were adjusting my language from the nervous pauses in their Mandarin. Even so, he seemed determined to keep the encounter cordial.
‘Let’s see how the relationship may proceed,’ he said, jamming the butt of his cigar into an enormous glass ashtray. ‘But for now, as a token of our gratitude, please take this.’ He handed me an envelope. ‘There are many luxury stores here,’ he said. ‘I hope you will find yourself something agreeable.’