What drove a few thousand men from the deserts of western China to the front lines of Syria’s war?

In Our Hearts Burned for Home, journalist Emily Feng unearths the untold story of Uyghur exiles who fled China’s expanding police state–only to become a pivotal force in the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. At the heart of this narrative is a startling paradox: Beijing’s repression, meant to crush dissent, instead scattered and radicalized a generation.

Tracing the journey from the crushed student protests of 1990s Xinjiang to the Islamist battlegrounds of Idlib, this book reveals how a campaign of surveillance and cultural erasure helped give rise to a Uyghur militant movement far from home. Through vivid reporting and rare access to fighters and families, Feng explores how these men became both victims and agents of global jihad–and how their stateless revolution now shapes Syria’s fragile future.

Emily Feng is an international correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan and beyond. Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018 and won two Human Rights Press awards, and her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China was recognized by the National Headliners Award. She lives in Washington DC.

Feng will be in conversation with Abigail Hauslohner,the Financial Times’ US-Middle East Foreign Affairs Correspondent, writing about Washington’s evolving policy, relationships and actions in the Middle East and Africa. She previously covered national security for The Washington Post, and was based in the Middle East for many years before that, first as a correspondent for TIME Magazine and then as the Post’s Cairo bureau chief.