Last summer, as fighters from the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra swept across the Orontes river into the Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughur, a strange caravan followed in their wake: Thousands of women and children, marching across the border from refugee camps inside Turkey, to occupy the farms and homes of local residents who had fled. This was their promised land: An Islamic state to rival the Islamic State (IS). For some 3,500 families, though, their new home amidst the lush green slopes of the village of Zanbaq was just a stepping stone to a homeland more than 4,500 kilometres away — a great sprawl of ice, rock and prairie, perched on the roof of the world. They spoke languages no one around them understood: Uyghur and Chinese.
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