Nuriman Abdureshid

Nuriman Abdureshid was born in Kashgar, in the Xinjiang region of China. She grew up in a small village surrounded by love from her parents and her siblings. Encouraged by her family to further her education, Nur left China in 2014 to attend university in Turkey.

By this time, the Chinese Communist Party had already begun the mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. One day in 2017 when Nur called home, like she did every day, no one answered. Nur, like countless other Uyghurs, would soon face the horrifying realization that her family had fallen victim to the CCP’s crimes against humanity.

Eventually, Nur found out that her family was sent to prison. It would be years later, following the release of the Xinjiang Police Files by VOC, that Nur finally received conclusive documentation about the fates of her mother, father, and two brothers who have been arbitrarily imprisoned in camps for the past five and a half years.

They were each sentenced to 13-17 years behind bars for “preparing terrorist activities,” a common pretext for arbitrary detention in Communist China. As conclusive research by VOC and others demonstrates, Beijing specifically targets Uyghurs for peaceful, normal expressions of cultural and religious identity, including targeted suppression of birth rates. This campaign of forced assimilation thereby fulfills the criteria for genocide under the Geneva Convention.

Since 2017 Beijing has interned over 1 million Uyghurs in mass internment camps under the pretext of counter-terrorism, the largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust.

Today, Nur continues to advocate for her family while speaking out against the evils of the CCP and the plight of the Uyghurs through her work as a journalist. She currently reports at Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur service, where she has made it her life’s mission to raise awareness and expose China’s Uyghur genocide.

Nur has still not heard from her family.