Inside a secret plan to bring Uyghurs trapped in China to the United States

Washington: The police officers came for Ayshem Mamut a week ago at her home in northwest China.

They told her to pack her bags. She could have been taken to a prison, a detention center or an internment camp, just like many other ethnic Uyghur Muslims who have vanished, sometimes for years.

But four days later, the 73-year-old Chinese citizen was in Virginia having a Thanksgiving meal with two sons she had not seen in 20 years and four grandchildren she had never met.

She sometimes talked, sometimes cried, as they ate traditional Uyghur dishes of noodle soup, lamb stew, broiled chicken, salad and rice with chickpeas.

Last week, US officials said that China had freed three American men, one of them an FBI informant, in exchange for two imprisoned Chinese spies and at least one other Chinese citizen. But as part of that deal, China also quietly agreed to allow Mamut and two other Uyghurs, one an American citizen, to leave the country for the United States.

The Biden administration has not made public the part of the deal involving the Uyghurs, and it is being reported here for the first time.

"Waking up in America and seeing my family, especially my grandchildren, is nothing short of a dream come true," Mamut said.

The story of the Uyghurs' journey to freedom is one of persistent efforts by anguished family members and US officials in the face of an increasingly authoritarian China. US officials privately raised the cases for years in talks with their Chinese counterparts. President Joe Biden mentioned Mamut twice in face-to-face meetings with Xi Jinping, China's leader.

China had barred Mamut from leaving the country because her oldest son, Nury Turkel, was involved in advocacy for Uyghur rights.

"It's amazing to me that she was able to keep it together all those years," Turkel, 54, a former US official and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said in an interview. He hugged his mother on the tarmac and wept last Wednesday night after she stepped off a Boeing 767 chartered by the US government at a military base in San Antonio, Texas.

"Her ability to endure, to not lose sight, to manage her disappointment is something that personally I can't do as a free person."

Turkel and his family have experienced the hardships of Chinese rule for more than a half-century. Mamut gave birth to him in a reeducation camp in Kashgar in 1970, during China's Cultural Revolution. He came to the United States as a graduate student in 1995, was granted asylum and then invited his parents to visit him. They came in 2000 and again in 2004, when he graduated from American University's law school.

Turkel became a leading advocate for Uyghur human rights, including working on cases of Uyghurs detained by the US military in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba during the post-9/11 wars. In 2009, his parents wanted to visit him in the Washington area. When police refused to give them their passports, they realized they were barred from traveling because of Turkel's advocacy work. Turkel then began trying to bring pressure on the Chinese government to let his parents leave the country.

Chinese officials allowed Turkel's father, Ablikim Mömin, a retired professor, to travel for two weeks in 2015 to meet with his four sons in Turkey, but their mother was forced to stay at home.

Turkel spoke with officials in the Obama and Trump administrations about his parents' situation. When President Donald Trump visited Beijing in 2017, he gave Xi a list of people his administration wanted freed. Turkel's parents were on the list, as was Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur professor sentenced to life in prison in 2014 on a conviction of "separatism."

In May 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., appointed Turkel to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, where he would serve for four years. Turkel told Secretary of State Antony Blinken about his parents' plight during an online meeting in fall 2021.

In December 2021, China announced sanctions against four US officials on the religious freedom commission, including Turkel, in retaliation for sanctions that the Biden administration had imposed on Chinese officials for abuses in Xinjiang.

Turkel spoke with R. Nicholas Burns, the designated US ambassador to China, before he left for Beijing. Burns later asked US diplomats to check on Turkel's parents in the city of Urumqi. "He made a personal commitment," Turkel said.

Turkel's father died in April 2022, at age 83. Turkel was on an official trip to Uzbekistan but could not fly to China for the funeral because of the sanctions against him.

"Because of years of enforced family separation, and along with social isolation, he was losing it," Turkel said. "He was wanting to go."

Burns invited Mamut, now widowed, to visit him in Beijing, but security officers at the airport in Urumqi kept her from boarding a plane, Turkel said.

"That was a public slap to all of us," he said. "It was morally crushing for my mom."

US-China relations hit a low point in early 2023 after the Pentagon discovered a Chinese spy balloon above the continental United States. Turkel was losing hope and expressed his frustration in congressional testimony and essays.

But US officials persisted. Turkel said that Biden mentioned his mother in a meeting with Xi in Woodside, California, that November, then again last month in Lima, Peru. Still, as recently as early last month, Turkel did not sound optimistic when we spoke at an event.

Then on Nov. 24, a White House official told Turkel that his mother would be on a US government plane leaving China later that week. Around the same time, police officers were visiting Mamut's home. Turkel spoke to her by phone and told her to go along with whatever the officers suggested.

Mamut spent that Monday seeing a dentist, visiting her husband's grave and packing a bag with traditional Uyghur silk cloth that she could use to make clothes for her grandchildren in America. The next morning, she boarded a charter plane to Beijing with police officers and the other two Uyghurs, a man and his daughter.

The three of them stayed in a government guesthouse in Beijing on Tuesday night. Their planned departure was delayed by six hours, making them nervous. On Wednesday night, they were taken to the airport, where the US government charter plane awaited them.

Burns walked with them up the plane's stairs and took photos inside with them. The three freed American prisoners -- Mark Swidan, Kai Li and John Leung -- were on the flight, as was Roger D. Carstens, the US special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and other US officials. One of the diplomats put Mamut on the phone with her son.

The Uyghurs on the plane burst into tears after it took off.

Turkel and a younger brother, Mamutjan, boarded their own flight to go from northern Virginia to San Antonio.

At a refueling stop in Alaska, the group traveling from China got separate calls from Biden and Blinken. I was on Blinken's official plane returning from a diplomatic trip to Rome when he made that call. After we landed outside Washington, an aide told me that Blinken had spoken to the three freed American men but did not mention there were also Uyghurs on the trip.

Mamut left a message on Turkel's voicemail during the Anchorage stop: "We are in America."

Hours later, near midnight, they were in each other's arms on the tarmac in Texas.