Ilshat H. Kokbore is the president of the Uyghur American Assoc., a member of the records information management profession who currently works for the federal government as a contractor. Before coming to the US, Ilshat was a lecturer at Shihezi Tech College in Shihezi, East Turkistan (Xinjiang Uyghurs Autonomous Region, in Chinese). Ilshat graduated from Dalian Tech University 1988 with a major in Chemical Engineering.

Ilshat has been a Uyghur language and chemical engineering lecturer for 15 years at the Shihezi Vocational Teacher Training College, East Turkistan. He has published academic articles in local newspapers and magazines and given lectures in medical college and adult education college. He was a certified Chinese Uyghur language interpreter / translator in the Uyghur region and has done numerous court and legislative translation and interpreting assignments. Due to the political prosecution by the Chinese government, Ilshat had to escape for survival, leaving behind elderly parents and a family with a teenage son, in 2003.

Ilshat's escape trip ended up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he applied for political asylum immediately after his arrival. While in Malaysia, Ilshat worked at the Malaysian Chinese Muslim Assoc. as the Chinese language teacher and cultural advisor. He also translated two Islamic English books into Chinese and published them.

After three long years of waiting, Ilshat came to the US in July of 2006, as a refugee.

Ilshat is a Chinese-language writer and blogger who is well-known in Chinese dissident society. In 2016, he published another Chinese-language book, about Uyghur history and the Uyghur independent movement overseas. He frequently gives lectures in Chinese, English, and the Uyghur language all over the world to various groups who are interested in Uyghur issues. Recently he presented the current Uyghur crisis at George Washington University and Indiana State University to a wide audience.