Daniel began to look forward to the trip to Somalia.

Daniel sped through the streets of Mogadishu on the back seat of a four-wheel-drive vehicle, followed by a pickup with eight guards. They towered over the bed of the truck in their camouflage shirts, tall and thin and carrying machine guns. Daniel was travelling without Jan, who had gone off on a job and hadn’t allowed Daniel to join him. Through the car window, he saw skeletal houses that had collapsed due to bombs or were deserted and riddled by gunfire. Suddenly, in the middle of this spectral neighbourhood, he saw a football goal.

‘Stop! Can we stop here?’ he asked.

‘You’ve got fifteen minutes, max twenty,’ said the driver and Daniel jumped out with his camera over his shoulder. He knew that the Islamist militant al-Shabaab group would be able to sniff them out if they stayed too long in one place.

Children and elders in worn-out sandals were running around on the sand after a football, and when the kids saw Daniel, they ran over and passed him the ball, which he slammed into the goal. He squatted for a while with his camera in his lap to get them used to his presence. To the left of the makeshift football pitch, a bombed roof sloped down to the ground at a forty-five-degree angle and now served as a kind of viewing terrace from which people were watching the game. Daniel took photos, moving around between the players and loving the life-affirming fact that they were running about in their football jerseys amid such destruction. When his time was up, he returned to the car as agreed and they drove back to their guarded accommodation.

The photos from the football match in a bombed-out Mogadishu were part of a black-and-white series called ‘Born in War’, which he was documenting on this trip. It revealed what an incredible amount of hope he had seen in the war-torn city.

It didn’t occur to him how dangerous it was to travel around Somalia until he was back home, processing his time there. The far more experienced Jan Grarup had been responsible for their security, so Daniel hadn’t paid much attention. But it didn’t deter him. He knew more than ever that he wanted to be a photojournalist.

· * ·

Daniel had been travelling in the aftermath of a civil war in Somalia, but in the autumn of 2012 it was the Syrians who were at war with themselves. A popular revolution demanding reform had turned into a full-scale battle between armed rebels and a brutal regime. Daniel read articles and searched for images on the Internet that could give him greater insight into the conflict. He looked at photographs of bombed-out houses, lifeless babies covered in dust who had been dug out of ruins, camouflaged snipers lying in wait with Kalashnikovs, ambulances unloading the wounded at hospitals.

He couldn’t find anything to compare with his football pictures from Somalia in the coverage of the Syrian conflict. The faces in the images merged into one another and he wondered what he should photograph to make Danes more aware of the war. How could he focus people’s attention on a bloody conflict far away, where President Assad was sending bombers over Aleppo, the country’s second largest city and industrial centre, in an attempt to put down the rebellion?

The sound of the bombers had become an everyday occurrence for Syrians, just like the cluster bombs and Scud missiles that rained down on civilian areas. The rebels were fighting in different factions under the Free Syrian Army (FSA), but the opposition couldn’t agree on a common goal and infighting had arisen between several of the rebel groups, who were also committing more war crimes in response to the hardening effect of their environment.

New groups were springing up each week – some of them with a more Islamist identity than had been seen in the war thus far. One of the largest and most powerful Islamist groups was Jabhat al-Nusra, which later turned out to be the Syrian branch of the terrorist organization, al-Qaeda. Jabhat al-Nusra was growing rapidly, with the goal of ousting the Assad regime and creating a more Islamist government. The group operated under the leadership of a Syrian war veteran, who, like hundreds of other jihadists, had crossed the border between Syria and Iraq with Assad’s approval to fight the Americans in Iraq after the invasion in 2003. The self-proclaimed Emir of Jabhat al-Nusra, who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was a man the world knew very little about and who had for a long time kept the group from being directly associated with al-Qaeda. Instead, it had been created as a Syrian organization that looked after the interests of Syrians.

Jolani had been held at the US base Camp Bucca in the Basra province of southern Iraq. He had also been imprisoned for a while by the Assad regime and rumour had it that he had been crammed in with hundreds of other Islamists in Syria’s notorious torture prison in Sednaya, near Damascus.

At the beginning of the revolution in May and June 2011, President Assad granted amnesty to numerous political prisoners from Sednaya – most of them with a pronounced Islamist profile. The president was aware that the prisoners were likely to join the rebellion once they were released and would Islamicize it. This would benefit the Assad regime by supporting its narrative that the revolutionaries were ‘terrorists’, dangerous to Syria and the region as a whole. The plan worked as intended and the threat from the Islamists became a self-fulfilling prophecy, not least because the Assad regime was primarily attacking the moderate factions. As had been seen so often before in the Middle East, corrupt totalitarian regimes and militants kept each other busy and used each other in an almost symbiotic relationship.

Some of the prisoners released from Sednaya joined Jabhat al-Nusra, and in the autumn of 2012 fighters from the weaker and more secular factions of the Free Syrian Army also began to switch to the more successful Jabhat al-Nusra, where they had access to better weapons and stood in a stronger position alongside more fearless, experienced soldiers. In December 2012 Jabhat al-Nusra was added to the US list of terrorist organizations, because of the movement’s links to al-Qaeda in Iraq, but that didn’t stop its momentum in the Syrian Civil War.

In March 2013 Jabhat al-Nusra and another Islamist movement, Ahrar al-Sham, announced an offensive called ‘The Raid of the Almighty’ against the city of Raqqa in north-east Syria. Raqqa was the first provincial capital to fall quickly to the rebels. The black Jabhat al-Nusra flags flew over the city and the rebels captured the government’s administrative headquarters, where they recorded a video of the captive governor which was broadcast on the opposition-friendly channel Orient Television. The Assad regime had lost its grip on Raqqa to groups with an Islamist profile.

Meanwhile, the civilians were caught in the middle. In Aleppo wide pieces of fabric were hung across streets and alleyways to block the snipers’ view into people’s apartments. Schools were either closed or destroyed and it had become difficult to find food. The lines of fire, the battle fronts, and the regime and rebel checkpoints constantly moved around residential neighbourhoods. Those who could packed a couple of blankets, some clothes and fled.

While the civilians were fleeing, several thousand foreigners from Arab and western countries came to join the fight in Syria.

One of them was the Belgian Jejoen Bontinck.

· * ·

Jejoen’s friends had already gone to Syria. They had been recruited through the network Sharia4Belgium, which regularly contacted Jejoen to persuade him to take part in the war. He had just turned eighteen and had no girlfriend, no job and wasn’t in school, so there was nothing to prevent him from seeking adventure. In February 2013 he packed his father’s sleeping bag and told him he was going to Amsterdam with some friends.