Since its creation, we have learned about the Islamic State from its enemies. Its story has largely been told by those fighting the group in Iraq and Syria, traumatized civilians who have escaped its brutal rule, and the occasional defector. That is about to change. This is the story of Abu Ahmad, a Syrian operative for the Islamic State who witnessed the group’s lightning expansion firsthand and spent months among its most notorious foreign fighters.

In this series of three articles, he provides unique insight into how Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s political scheming paved the way for the Islamic State’s expansion into Syria, al Qaeda’s efforts to stem the group’s rise, and the terrifying weapons in the arsenal of the self-proclaimed “caliphate.” Some names and details have been omitted to protect Abu Ahmad. Read part two here and part three here.

READ MORE PART ONE:

Present At the Creation CLICK HERE PART TWO:

How the Islamic State Seized a Chemical Weapons Stockpile CLICK HERE PART THREE:

The Greatest Divorce In the Jihadi World CLICK HERE

Abu Ahmad never hesitated in his embrace of the Syrian uprising. Born in a northern Syrian city to a conservative and religious Sunni Arab family, he was a student when the revolt began in March 2011, and joined the protests against President Bashar al-Assad from day one.

“With excitement in our hearts we saw [the uprising in] Egypt happening, followed by the revolution in Libya,” he said. “We hoped the wind of change would not pass our country.”

When the uprising became a full-fledged civil war by mid-2012, Abu Ahmad decided to take up arms and fight. He joined a jihadi-leaning rebel group, whose members were mostly Syrians but also included some foreign fighters from Europe and Central Asia. The composition of the brigades was in flux then — every couple of months, Abu Ahmad’s group would either change its name or unite with other jihadi rebels. But then the groups began to consolidate: In Spring 2013, Abu Ahmad chose to side with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant when it officially expanded into Syria, as tensions escalated between the jihadi group and the Nusra Front. The group would go on to proclaim itself a worldwide caliphate in June 2014, assuming the name “Islamic State” to reflect its global ambitions. To this day, Abu Ahmad is a serving member in the organization, with unique insight into the group’s behavior and its history.

Over the course of our more than 15 meetings with Abu Ahmad, we questioned him intensively about his knowledge of the jihadi group and his bona fides as one of the “soldiers of the caliphate.” Over a period of 10 months, we spent more than 100 hours with him. He patiently answered our questions on everything from how he ended up with the Islamic State, how the organization is organized, and the identity of the European foreign fighters within the group. Our interviews would go on for six hours a day, in week-long stretches.

Abu Ahmad took a great personal risk in talking to us. Because he is still with the Islamic State, we had to deliberately obscure some details about his life to protect his identity.

Abu Ahmad agreed to speak to us, he explained, for several reasons. Although he is still with the Islamic State, he doesn’t agree with everything the outfit does. He is attracted to the organization because he views it as the strongest Sunni group in the region. However, he is disappointed that it “has become too extreme,” blaming it for doing such things as crucifying, burning, and drowning its opponents and those who violate its rules.

For example, Abu Ahmad objected to a punishment that the Islamic State implemented in the northern Syrian city of al-Bab, where it put a cage in the middle of the city center, known as Freedom Square, to punish Syrian civilians guilty of minor crimes, such as selling cigarettes. The group, Abu Ahmad said, imprisoned Syrians in the cage for three days at a time, hanging a sign around their neck stating the crime that they had committed.

“Now the square is known as the Punishment Square,” he said. “I think this kind of harsh punishment is bad for us. It is making ISIS more feared than liked by Sunnis, which is not good at all.”

In the past, Abu Ahmad said, he had hoped the Islamic State would become “jihadi unifiers,” capable of bringing Sunni jihadis together under one banner. He admired the foreign fighters whom he knew, mainly young men from Belgium and the Netherlands who had traveled to Syria to fight jihad. They had all lived in rich and peaceful countries, and while tens of thousands of Syrians had paid large sums of money to be smuggled to Europe to escape the war, these jihadis voluntarily traveled in the exact opposite direction.

“These foreigners left their families, their houses, their lands and traveled all the way to help us here in Syria,” Abu Ahmad said. “So to support us they are truly sacrificing everything they have.”

But Abu Ahmad would soon sour on aspects of the jihadi group. First, the Islamic State has not brought jihadis together; on the contrary, tensions have risen with other groups, and he worried that “the rise of ISIS led to the breakup with the Nusra Front and the weakening of unified jihadi forces in Syria.”

Secondly, while some of the foreign fighters were men who led truly religious lives in Europe, he discovered another group that he took to thinking of as the “crazies.” These were mostly young Belgian and Dutch criminals of Moroccan descent, unemployed and from broken homes, who lived marginal lives in marginal suburbs of marginal cities. Most of these crazies had no idea about religion, and hardly any of them ever read the Quran. To them, fighting in Syria was either an adventure or a way to repent for their “sinful lives” in Europe’s bars and discos.

There was Abu Sayyaf, a jihadi from Belgium, who often talked about beheadings. He once asked his emir, Abu al-Atheer al Absi, if he could slaughter somebody. “I just want to carry a head,” Abu Sayyaf said. Locally he was known as al-thabah, or “the slayer.”

In war, the first victim is often the truth. The stories Abu Ahmad told us were so incredible, and so close to the seat of the Islamic State’s power, that we were determined to put his assertions to the test.

In order to do so, we set up a quiz for Abu Ahmad. He said that he knew many of the Dutch and Belgian fighters who had joined the Islamic State, so we prepared a list with roughly 50 photographs of jihadis from those countries who are known to have left for Syria. During a meeting with Abu Ahmad, we asked him to identify the men in the pictures.

Abu Ahmad’s answers confirmed that he had extensive knowledge about the European jihadis fighting for the Islamic State. In front of us — without access to the internet and with no outside help — Abu Ahmad went through the images, and correctly identified roughly 30 of the jihadis by name. In most cases, he would add some anecdotes about the fighter. For the other pictures, he said that he had not seen the people and did not know their names.

A behind-the-scenes photograph supplied by Abu Ahmad showing an Islamic State execution in the city of Palmyra.

Abu Ahmad showed us private photos and videos on his laptop of some Dutch, Belgian, and Central Asian fighters in Syria, which are not posted online. The only way that he could have had these images was through deep, personal experience within the jihadi community.

Abu Ahmad also proved that he had behind-the-scenes access to some of the Islamic State’s most spectacular acts of violence. After the jihadi group captured Palmyra in 2015, Abu Ahmad paid a visit to the desert city to witness a Game of Thrones-like setting for executions of the group’s opponents. One day in July 2015, two Islamic State members from Austria and Germany executed two people who they claimed were Syrian Army soldiers on the ancient city’s great colonnade. This was one of many executions in Palmyra; on July 4, the Islamic State released a video showing the bloody spectacle of teenage fighters executing 25 alleged Syrian soldiers in the city’s amphitheater.

Weeks before the official Islamic State video of the gruesome executions by the German and Austrian fighters went online, Abu Ahmad supplied us with a picture of the execution. The photograph not only shows the two prisoners moments before they are killed, but also shows two members of the Islamic State’s media unit capturing the horror scene. Never has the group published such a “behind-the-scenes” picture of one of its executions; it is not available online. The picture supplied by Abu Ahmad is truly unique — secretly taken by an insider.

Remarkably, one of the two cameramen in the photograph is Harry Sarfo, a German citizen who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State. He said he subsequently became disillusioned with the group and fled back to Germany, where he is currently imprisoned. The New York Times profile of Sarfo claims that Islamic State members told Sarfo “to hold the group’s black flag and to walk again and again in front of the camera” as they filmed a propaganda video. The photograph supplied by Abu Ahmad, however, contradicts the narrative that Sarfo played a passive role in this production: While the video only shows him holding the black flag, the photograph shows that he was one of the two cameramen filming the killers who are about to execute the two Syrians.

Abu Ahmad has not just watched the growing war between Syria’s jihadis from afar — he witnessed its beginning up close. The split between the Nusra Front and the Islamic State was one of the most epochal events of the Syrian war; it resulted in a massive divide within the anti-Assad ranks and signaled the rise of a new jihadi force, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that has come to overshadow al Qaeda.

Abu Ahmad had a front-row seat to how the jihadi world’s biggest divorce unfolded.