Yidiresi Aishan, a 33-year-old Uyghur activist has been held in a detention center in Tiflet in northwestern Morocco for over two months. The computer engineer, who has been living in Turkey with his wife and children since fleeing China in 2012, was transiting through Mohammed V international airport in Casablanca, on a journey from Istanbul to an unnamed European country, when local police detained him in July.

One week later, Moroccan authorities confirmed that Aishan had been arrested after a terrorism alert was issued by Beijing through Interpol. He now faces possible extradition to Xinjiang, China, where more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim communities have been held in concentration camps in a crackdown described as “genocide” by the U.S. State Department in July.

“He's in frustration, he's really afraid. If he's deported to China, it's a death sentence for him,” said Abduweli Ayup, a prominent Uyghur activist. Ayup, who is based in Norway, where he runs an organization dedicated to assisting Uyghurs in exile in Turkey.

Ayup, who worked with Aishan at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Istanbul in 2016, told me that he speaks with his friend every week and that he is helping his family financially.