It took less than a week for the young Belgian-Nigerian man to arrange the trip from Belgium through Turkey to the Syrian governorate of Idlib. Friends from Sharia4Belgium who were already in Syria described the route for him. Like many other fighters in Syria, he travelled through the official border crossing at Bab al-Hawa and, on 22 February, after a short drive, he arrived at a large villa in the Kafr Hamra neighbourhood, a well-to-do suburb of Aleppo, just north of the city. He didn’t know which faction he was actually joining, but he had been reunited with his friends.

The water in the villa’s pool was dark green and shallow, while the lawn around it looked like a park where the flowers and shrubs hadn’t been attended to for a long time. Jejoen was far from being the only foreigner. The grounds were huge and teeming with Dutch, Belgian and French men. When he first arrived, he worked out that there were at least sixty of them and eventually some had to be moved to another villa, because there wasn’t enough room.

Jejoen was welcomed by a man who bore the nom de guerre Abu Athir. Several of Jejoen’s friends just called him ‘sheikh’, as he was the leader of the Mujahideen Shura Council faction. Abu Athir had been hit in the leg by shrapnel and hobbled about the villa on crutches, surrounded by guards. He never carried a weapon, but left it to the European fighters to guard him as he drove around the area, either in a Jeep or a Mercedes.

There was a hierarchy in the organization and the new recruits had to work their way up and win Abu Athir’s trust before being sent to fight on the front lines. Abu Athir and his men had developed an elaborate vetting process, so recruits went to the front only when they had been tested and were clearly not working for foreign intelligence services. Newcomers were initially given the task of guarding either the villa in Kafr Hamra or Abu Athir himself when he was in meetings or sleeping.

The fighters whom Jejoen met were roughly the same age as him. Some had left their jobs or studies to fight in Syria; others were like him, with nothing to lose. When they arrived, they responded only to the warrior names they had chosen for themselves. Some of the foreign fighters already spoke Arabic and many of them established themselves in Syria by marrying locally or bringing their wives into the country. They wanted to live their life in the coming Islamic state.

Jejoen stayed at Abu Athir’s villa only for a short time before being sent to one of the Syrian regime’s old military bases half an hour’s drive away. Abu Athir’s men had seized control of the base and now used it as a training camp for new recruits.

There were more than fifty people at the base, most of them Europeans from France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. They received military training – physical exercises, target practice, strategic warfare and Islamic teachings. Jejoen thought the training was very professional, which wasn’t a coincidence. His trainer told him that he had previously been an officer in the Egyptian army. Now and then, Abu Athir came by in his Mercedes to watch the recruits at work. Jejoen received not only food and shelter, but also access to a special brotherhood, something he had never experienced before. He ate, slept and trained with other men who had come to join the war. It was easy to feel he belonged.

Some months later, Jejoen’s path in Syria would cross with those of Daniel and James Foley. It all began with a landmark event that took place on 8 April 2013 and quickly changed Syria and the organization led by Abu Athir.

On that day, a long audio recording of 21 minutes and 30 seconds was posted on jihadist Internet forums. On the recording could be heard the voice of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader for several years of al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISI). He confirmed what many observers had suspected: that ISI was operating in Syria through the Jabhat al-Nusra faction.

‘It is now time to declare before the people of the Levant and the world that the al-Nusra Front is an extension of Islamic State in Iraq and a part of us,’ Baghdadi said. He continued, ‘We worked out the plans for them and set the framework and supported them financially every month and gave them men who know the theatre of war, from immigrants to locals.’

Baghdadi then announced that his organization would now be renamed the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. In Arabic ‘al-Sham’ means ‘the Levant’, so from that moment on both acronyms ISIL and ISIS were used. Baghdadi stated that ISI and Jabhat al-Nusra were now unified under the new name ISIS, which reflected significantly greater cross-border ambitions for an undivided Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

At that moment, the world didn’t know what consequences the audio recording would have for the region. Baghdadi wasn’t yet a well-known name in American and European living rooms. There was only limited information about him and a few photographs.

Behind the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi hid Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. He was apparently born near the Iraqi city of Samarra in 1971 and was awarded a master’s degree and a doctorate in Islamic studies by the Islamic University in Adhamiya, a suburb of Baghdad. People who knew Baghdadi in his childhood described him in several media sources as a quiet type who liked football. At the turn of the millennium, he had an education, a wife and a son.

In March 2003 US and UK forces invaded Iraq. Six months later Baghdadi had formed his own Islamist movement called Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamaah, which, loosely translated, means ‘Army of People of the Sunni Muslim Community’. On 31 January 2004 Baghdadi was arrested by US military intelligence while visiting a friend in the city of Fallujah in the so-called Sunni Triangle north-west of Baghdad, where a rebellion had broken out after the ousting of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.

Baghdadi was imprisoned until December 2004 in Camp Bucca, the American prison near the border with Kuwait, where he developed relationships and friendships with other inmates. Jolani, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, was in the prison at the same time, but the two men didn’t meet. Baghdadi was released after almost a year because the Americans regarded him as a low-level prisoner who did not pose a significant threat to US forces in Iraq.

In 2007 he joined al-Qaeda’s Shura Council and in May 2010 Baghdadi was chosen to be the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISI). Under his leadership, ISI conducted a wide range of well-planned and spectacular suicide attacks in Iraq. In March and April 2011 alone, the group accepted responsibility for twenty-three attacks south of Baghdad.

Baghdadi’s audio recording of 8 April 2013 was the beginning of an ideological and political power struggle between Jolani from Jabhat al-Nusra, who didn’t recognize the merger with ISI, and Baghdadi – a struggle that would lead to ISIS breaking with al-Qaeda.

From that day on, Arab and western jihadists had to choose between two variants of extreme Islamism. Many of the rebel leaders chose Baghdadi’s ISIS and thereby took many foreign fighters over to ISIS, among them the Belgian jihadist Jejoen, whose group, the Mujahideen Shura Council led by Abu Athir, swore fidelity to ISIS.

This declaration was the beginning of ISIS’s aggressive expansion into the Syrian Civil War.

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Daniel began his preparations for a reporting trip to Syria in the midst of these political manoeuvrings between Islamist factions. He wanted to portray the Syrians who could not or would not flee, to find out how they were living in a state of emergency.

At the same time, he began seeing his school sweetheart Signe again. They had kept in touch for a long time after splitting up and wished each other happy birthday every year. One night in October they were out drinking beer at a bar in Copenhagen until 4 a.m. and, after several months of orbiting each other, they got back together. Daniel was happy to once again be with the woman with the most beautiful eyes in the world.