Editor's note: This story contains explicit language.

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It was amazing, really, how quickly he escaped the war zone. That's what struck Jassem al-Nuwaiji after he had finally left his home. His trip to the border had been long, 267 miles by car and foot, but at the moment he arrived, it was simple. He just approached the fence and looked for the hole. It was right where the smuggler said it would be. A wide swath, easy to walk through: on one side, Syria; on the other, Turkey. He stepped across the line.

And then, when the border police started shooting, he ran. The forest was thick. Bullets struck the trees all around him. He sprinted until exhaustion set in, then noticed the shooting had subsided. "Small problem," he says, grinning as he tells the story later. When asked for a big problem, he shrugs. In a war, by the time you realize you have a big problem, you're probably already dead.

IT'S OCTOBER 2015, a Tuesday, and Jassem is at soccer practice in his new home of Gaziantep, Turkey, ready for one of his first training sessions since he gave up his professional career a few years ago. His hair is black and gelled, his eyes big and brown and searching. He lingers at the edge of a trash-strewn field until his coach approaches, potbellied and balding and beset with a put-on snarl. The coach talks to the team about clean passes and tough defending and the forceful overthrow of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Jassem came to Turkey hoping to replicate the sense of community he discovered during the isolation of the Syrian civil war. The movement for freedom there offered him a calling greater than even soccer, and for months he witnessed something almost beautiful among the resistance fighters of his hometown, fighting on amid that much blood and overwhelming odds. But war's destruction is total, and the sense of camaraderie became a casualty, as surely as the dead and wounded who fell around Jassem. These days, in Turkey, he's struggling to reclaim that piece of himself he discovered and lost in the civil war. He doesn't know whether this team will help him find it, but he's hopeful. His cleats fit. His jersey is resplendent and green.

He walks out to midfield, where the players huddle. Jassem sticks his hand in the middle with the rest of the team. Syria! someone shouts. In unison, they all join.

Syria! Syria!

Free!

Free!

Free!

They call themselves the Free Syrian national team. Founded by former Syrian sport officials, filled with ex-pros and based here in southern Turkey, the club aims to earn FIFA recognition and supplant Syria's official national team, which is backed by the country's dictator, Assad.

This is why Jassem is here. He sees soccer as a tool for revolution. Score goals, win games, topple a dictator -- even from the remove of another country. It's all connected; everything is war. He rejects the label "refugee." He fled Syria only to save it. "Sport," he says, "is even more powerful than military action. We are painting the struggle of the Syrian people for the entire world."

After just a handful of practices, Jassem crawls into the back of a van with his teammates, bodies crushed together and windows down. It's impossible for even the men in this van to quantify the full cost of the Syrian civil war. It began in 2012 and continues without end, a Gordian knot of tangled interests fighting it out in the same theater: a dictator desperate to keep power; an army of rebels fighting for democracy; foreign governments with competing agendas; insurgent jihadists with terroristic dreams. As they seek their own ends, over 470,000 Syrians have died, slightly fewer than the number of Iraqis killed in the decadelong U.S.-Iraq War. All Jassem and his teammates hear are world leaders in European parliaments and on American campaign trails debating what, exactly, they're willing to do to help -- and they see those leaders shrug their shoulders to say, Sorry, not very much.

The van reaches the highway and civilization disappears, replaced by a parade of softly rising hills, brown and arid. Jassem stares out the window, his body moving with the rhythms of the road. After a couple of hours, they arrive at a small stadium in the town of Nizip, and they walk inside for an exhibition match against the Turkish amateur club Nizipspor.

Jassem starts at forward, and he darts in and around the box whenever the Syrians control the ball. It's his first organized match since the war began, and it shows. Years ago, Jassem scored acrobatic goals all across Syria and in leagues around the Middle East, taking on defenders with a feather touch and preternatural vision. In his hometown of Deir Ezzor, fans carried him out of the stadium on their shoulders. Children mobbed him in the markets and the streets. There in his working-class city, celebrity was something small and intimate. Jassem believed each fan was his friend.

But here he's anonymous and rusty. He tires quickly. His touch fails him. Yet even far from his top form, he's among the best players on the team, possessed with a kinetic confidence. He assists on a goal, a well-timed pass buried by a teammate, and he earns several more chances of his own. The game ends 1-1, a fair result for a newly formed club.

But if this team is painting the face of the Syrian revolution, its work is hidden. Only one reporter is here, surrounded by just a few dozen fans.

Yet Jassem seems pleased. He walks off the field, smiling and light-footed. "This is only one game," he says. With more games will come more publicity, he believes, more funds, more opportunities to show their quality and spread their message to the world. He drapes his arm around the back of a teammate. "We just need time."

THAT NIGHT THEY eat takeout. Flatbread and hummus, chicken and rice, all from the closest Syrian restaurant, delivered by team staffers to Jassem's dorm room, where a small group sits, scattered around the floor, telling stories.

Someone asks Jassem whether he remembers his first demonstration, and he smiles and nods. It was fall of 2011. The protests against the corruption of Assad's government had begun in other parts of the country months before, part of the democratic fervor of the Arab Spring, spreading slowly and gathering momentum by the week. People fled the city of Homs and settled in Jassem's Deir Ezzor, 227 miles to the east. The refugees talked about massacres, crowds sprayed with bullets by shabiha, unofficial government thugs.

Jassem had loved his country. He'd trained with the national team, wearing its flag and singing its anthem, welling with pride. But the stories from those arriving in Deir Ezzor -- of government forces slaughtering civilians -- left him unsure of exactly what "Syria" had ever been.

One night he and his friends decided they'd heard enough. Jassem went to a drawer in his house and pulled out a checkered black-and-white kaffiyeh. He wrapped the scarf around the top of his head, then down across his ears and nose and mouth, leaving only a small slit for his eyes. The scarf was tight and its fabric itched, but Jassem couldn't risk being recognized.

He walked outside. His friends joined him. His chest thumped and sweat soaked through his scarf, the air hot and alive. They joined a larger crowd, marching together, and as they moved they began to scream.

The people want to topple the regime!

God! Syria! Freedom and nothing more!

They passed neighbors gathered around rugs on the street, drinking tea and begging Jassem and his friends to please stop. The army will come, they said. They will kill us. Jassem ignored them, swept up by the crowded streets and the people like him who screamed such dangerous words.

"I felt," he says, "like I was flying."

Years later, sitting in this tiny apartment with his new club, Jassem glows as he tells the story. His teammates look on, grinning and enthralled. Many of them had just hit puberty in 2011 -- it's difficult to remember the days before revolution became war. Now they listen as Jassem returns them to a time when Syria's potential seemed limitless. "It was very fun," he says, smiling.

But war came to Deir Ezzor that summer. Syria's turmoil confused and thrilled Jassem. He recounts to his teammates how he went to protests, to prison and to soccer practice, once all in the same day.

The country fractured. Western-approved rebels controlled some areas, hard-line Islamists others, and almost everywhere, those groups splintered and overlapped. On a map, Syria looked like an ever-changing puzzle. On the ground, it felt simpler: men patrolling their neighborhoods, imposing their will.

If you wanted to play football, you had to pledge allegiance to ISIS. - Jassem al-Nuwaiji

Jassem volunteered alongside the Free Syrian Army, a rebel faction that supported democracy and opposed both Assad and the region's theocratic extremists. He fired his Kalashnikov a few times, but he says he never killed anyone. Instead, he helped in whatever capacities the war required, retrieving medical supplies, delivering food and digging through rubble each time the bombs fell. At the war's peak, he lost friends or acquaintances almost daily. Death was so ubiquitous that its horrors numbed him. At first, he had taken shelter every time he heard a bomb fall. Within months, he accepted explosions and gunshots as the soundtrack to his daily routine. "If you can hear the bomb," he says, "that means you're still alive."

Death's nearness sharpened each moment into focus. Shelling flattened homes, and families moved in with other families. They watched Champions League matches on satellite, dozens of men crowded and screaming around the ultimate wartime luxury -- a working television. During Ramadan, families crushed together in small rooms lit by candles, breaking their fast at night with what little food they could find and share. The bread seemed decadent. The continuation of long-held traditions felt like a middle finger to the regime. Relationships formed wordlessly, by simple proximity, stitched together by the intimate act of trying to help each other stay alive.

Jassem tells the room about his wife, of the day they married, when he wore a tux and listened to staccato gunfire and watched hundreds of people dance for hours on end. Soon she became pregnant. When she went into labor, winds whipped a sandstorm through the city. Fighting slowed, and after a seven-hour delivery, Jassem's son was born but with the umbilical cord around his neck. When the boy at last cried, Jassem took his very breath as support for the revolution.

Now, three years later in Turkey, as he sits and winds his way through these stories, he pauses for just a moment and looks down to choose his next words.

"Those were," he says, "the most beautiful days of my life."

And yet, horror lurked amid them. He remembers hospitals turned to rubble, streets littered with human limbs. He once walked through a regime prison and saw a man nailed through his hands to a wall. On another afternoon, he witnessed a young girl, perhaps 6, who slipped through her father's grasp and took off running down an open road. Jassem watched her for a few steps until her body jolted and then dropped, shot and killed by a regime sniper.

While he tells the story, Jassem looks away, then stares down at his own hands. "It wasn't enough to kill," he says, and then he looks back up and his face hardens. "They wanted to show artistry in their killing." What he remembers most clearly are the moments immediately after she fell to the ground, dead. The sniper kept shooting. With every new bullet, her father screamed as the girl's tiny body appeared to dance.