Chris Rickleton and Beiimbet Moldagali
for Freedom for Eurasia
Family members and neighbor (far right) of Alimnur Turganbay outside their house on August 4, 2025, in the village of Uzynagash near Almaty, Kazakhstan. Photo by Chris Rickleton
As Alimnur Turganbay was preparing to set off for Kazakhstan’s Kalzhat–Dulata border crossing with China, he let his oldest daughter Riza Alimnur know that he could not wait to return.
Riza had recently had a baby girl, Khadisha, but Kazakh traditions meant that Khadisha should remain in the house of Riza’s husband’s family for the first 40 days after her birth.
That period was now coming to an end, and all that was standing between the 47-year-old trucker and a meeting with his new grandchild was a long-haul job bringing metals used for construction from China to Uzbekistan by way of Kazakhstan.
Instead, after crossing over from Kazakhstan, Turganbay was on the afternoon of July 23 apprehended by Chinese border officials. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
“I’m afraid that my father will be beaten, forced to sign some documents and given some injections or dangerous medications,” Riza told Freedom For Eurasia in an interview at her father’s modest home in Uzynagash, about an hour from Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty.
“I believe they are capable of such things,” she added, as Turganbay’s youngest daughter Peiil Alimnur wept heavily while swaddling Khadisha.
No Response From Kazakhstan, China
Tens of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs were caught up in China’s “Strike Hard” campaign, which went into overdrive in 2017 as facilities that became known outside the country as “re-education camps” proliferated across the western region of Xinjiang.
International experts estimate that over a million people, mostly from minority Turkic and Muslim groups, suffered some sort of incarceration as part of the campaign.
Beijing has shrugged off accusations of genocide and brainwashing, billing the measures as necessary to combat extremism and likening the camps to vocational training centers. .
Kazakhs are the second largest Turkic group in Xinjiang, with a population of around 1.5 million people, after the Uyghurs (over 11 million).
During the peak of mass arrests between 2017 and 2019, there were regular instances of Kazakhs being detained when crossing into China from Kazakhstan for business or to see relatives.
But overwhelmingly, the victims of those arrests were Chinese citizens with residency rights in Kazakhstan, their historic homeland.
Although Alimnur Turganbay was born in China, he has been a Kazakh passport holder since 2017 – a fact that should impel Kazakh officials to raise his case with Beijing.
Turganbay moreover has an official document from 2018 proving his exit from Chinese citizenship, obtained in hard copy in 2023.
Copy of an official document proving Alimnur Turganbay’s exit from Chinese citizenship. Photo by Chris Rickleton
“When these arrests happen, our government says that they cannot really do anything, because these ethnic Kazakhs are Chinese citizens,” said Bekzat Maksutkhanuly, Chairman of the unregistered Real Atajurt Volunteers group that is based in Kazakhstan’s Almaty and focused on rights abuses in Xinjiang.
“But Alimnur is not a Chinese citizen. Only a Kazakh citizen. So, what will they say now?”
Freedom For Eurasia contacted Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry for comment but received no reply before publication.
Alimnur Turganbay’s family, meanwhile, wants Kazakh police and diplomats to do more to push the case forward.
“To begin with, we received no response from the [Kazakh] Foreign Ministry. After that, they told us that they had called the Kazakh embassy in Beijing,” said Riza.
“I filed a statement on his disappearance with police in the [Kazakh city of] Taldykorgan on July 24. Then, on [August 1] the authorities informed us that they had only just sent a letter to the [Chinese authorities] in Urumqi. How much longer should I wait for my father? Another month, another year? We just want him home,” said Riza.
17 Years For Praying?
What little Turgunbay’s relatives know about his disappearance at the border, they know from one of the two truck drivers that traveled with him there, also bound for Uzbekistan.
While his colleagues were able to take their empty vehicles through customs for loading, Turganbay was taken to one side by border officials, the man told his family.
“When the two men asked what was happening to Alimnur, the officials just said to them, ‘You don’t have the right to ask that question. Don’t worry about him. Go about your business,’” Turgunbay’s wife, Kuldariya Sherizatkyzy, told Freedom For Eurasia.
Bekzat Maksutkhanuly, Chairman of the unregistered Real Atajurt Volunteers group. Photo by Chris Rickleton
The family is at a loss as to what Chinese authorities might want with Turganbay.
But one way that a person can easily earn the attention of the Chinese authorities is by having an imprisoned relative.
According to the Xinjiang Victims Database, Turganbay’s nephew Serik Dauitbek was arrested in 2018 and later sentenced to 17 years in jail, likely for praying and possibly after a stint in a re-education camp.
Turganbay was one of several Kazakhs now living in Kazakhstan who published video testimony on Dauitbek’s behalf for the Real Atajurt Volunteers YouTube channel that year.
Atajurt has published thousands of similar videos for Kazakhs detained and lost in Xinjiang, becoming a thorn in China’s side as the group succeeded in revealing and verifying the latest information about Beijing’s campaign against minorities.
That has put Kazakhstan’s pro-Beijing government in a difficult position, and authorities have repeatedly refused to register the group, effectively driving its founder Serikzhan Bilash into exile after jailing him for five months on extremism charges in 2019.
Turganbay’s family hail from Yining Country in Xinjiang’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture.
Prior to his trucking trip, he was last on Chinese territory in 2017, when he crossed over to settle permanently in Kazakhstan. Kuldariya had traveled to China several times earlier this year without issue, and was even in China, visiting relatives, at the time of her husband’s arrest.
Alimnur Turganbay’s Kazakh passport
Kazakhs with ties to China have become more confident about going back there in the last few years, with evidence suggesting that most of the camps that Chinese authorities likened to vocational training centers have now been closed down.
But Maksutkhanuly of Real Atajurt Volunteers notes that his group has heard multiple reports of Kazakhs being held and questioned by Chinese authorities at the border for up to 23 hours.
“They interrogate them and ask them to provide information about Kazakhstan, about their communities here, their neighbors. People that want to make regular trips between the two countries sometimes agree to these terms. If you don’t tell them what they want to hear, maybe they will arrest you,” Maksutkhanuly said.
Neighbors of Turganbay, who gathered at his home to support the family on August 2, insist that there can be no suggestions of foul play on Turganbay’s part.
“I have been a neighbor of this family for 25 years, first over there, now over here,” said Nazira Baizhuma, another Yining County native.
“Alimnur is a kindhearted and hard-working man. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke. In China, he was not attached to any religious organizations. Everything that he has achieved, he has achieved with his own hard work,” she said.
Another Uzynagash local, Yeleusiz Aidarkhan, supported her character assessment.
“Day and night his children are crying, not sleeping. The smile has disappeared from their faces and they feel grief. We have come here today to ask you to help us find him,” the elderly man told Freedom For Eurasia.
