Kayseri, Turkey – In the quiet streets of a suburb of the historic central Anatolian city of Kayseri, a group of children play football. They are Uighurs and Syrians.
Thirteen-year-old Moaaz is the oldest among them. He is one of the five children of Mohammad Taufeeq, 55, who fled with his family from the Syrian city of Homs six years ago. Two of his sons are now grown up and have moved away from home, while the younger three – Moaaz and his two sisters – live with their parents in Kayseri.
Once a successful businessman running a garment factory in Syria, Taufeeq is now a scrap dealer and lives with his family in a two-room house in the “Turkistan Mohalla” of Kayseri – named after the Uighurs who came to live here in the 1990s. In the Turkish language, Xinjiang – where many Uighurs come from in China – is called Doğu Türkistan, or East Turkistan.