Last spring, Soraya burst into a local Flight Centre in tears. She begged the travel agent to let her to make an urgent phone call. It was about a forced marriage dispute, she lied, and the call had to be made using their landline. The agent, taken aback, told her to go ahead and use the phone.

Soraya, a Lebanese Muslim woman from Sydney's west, phoned her boyfriend and told him - in an unrecognisable voice - that his flight to Turkey the next day was cancelled.

She was buying time to talk him out of it. The man she had fallen deeply for over the past 10 months was intending to travel to Syria via Turkey to fight for the terrorist group Islamic State.

Soraya discovered the plane tickets at his house the evening before, and she knew he was bound for Syria. She had been keeping track of his movements and his communication with recruiters for months.

A year ago, when Soraya met Abed at a cafe, she never expected she would expend all her energy "keeping him connected and creating doubt" throughout their relationship in order to furtively pull him away from the lures of Islamic State.

She could not have foreseen that she would lead a double-life, following Abed to secret recruiter meet-ups across Sydney to keep tabs on his activities. Nor could she have known when they first caught each other's eyes, that he would be en route for Syria someday.

Listen to Soraya telling her story in three parts on triple j Hack - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday this week at 5.30pm.

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'I didn't involve authorities. I had to do it myself.'

I recently met up with Soraya at a cafe not too far from the one she first met Abed. When she encountered the Afghan-Australian man in January last year, she was with her girlfriends. Abed was with a mate. The two began seeing each other in secret, a common practice amongst Muslim couples dating before marriage.

To protect the identities of Soraya and Abed, we are not using their real names.

"I can't tell you how many times [his] life was threatened...they [recruiters] threaten to kill you - [when] you're already in a ring," Soraya told me.

Having already lost a family member, who was killed fighting for Islamic State, Soraya refused to let it happen again.

Abed, who is from a small family in western Sydney, had never been religious. He was born into a Muslim family, but didn't know much Arabic nor did he read the Quran or pray - he could only recite the opening verse, the fatiha.

Why are young Australians being drawn to Islamic State? The ABC speaks to key players about what's luring young people to join Islamic State and what can be done to stop it happening.

But at the time the couple first became acquainted, Abed was interested in taking his faith more seriously, so he began attending lectures and workshops at the Markaz Imam Ahmad mosque in Liverpool in south western Sydney.

That's when Abed met a few men who had connections to Islamic State, and how he eventually ended up as part of The Crew.

"He was in a ring, he was part of what they called The Crew - and there's not just one crew," Soraya said. "There are literally pockets all over, and it's a combination of [people] online and people here."

It only took a matter of weeks for Abed to get close to a recruiter, and then months to groom him and persuade him to go to Syria.

Before discovering that Abed had been recruited, Soraya saw red flags. He seemed rigid, secretive and was out with friends a lot more than usual. An argument over the interpretation of a Quranic verse concerning the concept of jihad set off alarm bells for her. She said Abed insisted jihad meant holy war, as opposing to "striving" and "struggling", and he insisted Islam was "spread by the sword".

I don't care if people are extreme in their beliefs...so what? I don't give a shit. What I care about is what they do with that.

"[But] nobody, not French, not Lebanese, should have to die at the hands...nobody should have to be dead because of someone else's mindf***edness."

Soraya acted on the sly and retrieved Abed's phone's passcode. Her snooping revealed more. And it sucked her into months of following Abed, lying, and trying to "keep him connected" with her.

"I didn't involve authorities. I had to do it myself. And it was the biggest gamble of my entire life," she said.

"He became somebody I needed to save so I could save somebody else's life."

'I had a feeling something was happening'

There is an image that is sent to Australian Islamic State recruits on an encrypted mobile messaging app before they leave to fight in Syria.

In a series of points, it lists how recruits should act and what they should wear in order not to arouse any suspicion before travelling.

To remain undetected at airports and appear integrated in the general community, the macro instructs men to cut their hair, shave their beards, and to dress in Western clothing - nothing overtly Islamic.

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Whatsapp An operation by Iraqi Kurdish forces backed by US-led strikes to retake the town of Sinjar from Islamic State.

It tells recruits how they should walk and carry their bodies to avoid questioning, and to keep mundane, unassuming content on their phones.

Soraya discovered that Abed received this from a recruiter in the days before he planned to leave for Syria.

The Islamic State recruiters are set up as a hierarchy, with the chief leaders based overseas. However, there are physical recruiters in place here with connections to overseas, and Soraya had a glimpse of it all.

Blog details journey behind radicalisation A blog post believed to have been written by Australian teenager Jake Bilardi reveals the intentions behind his radicalisation to Islam.

Recruiters based in Syria would coax recruits on the ground in Australia to join them. "The ones already there talk to the ones here on the phone to convince them to come over," Soraya said.

"You will never have contact with people overseas - only if you are part of The Crew, and it takes time to get there."

Abed was lying to Soraya about where he would go in the evenings. She would follow him, sometimes wearing a niqab to disguise herself. The two lived a few suburbs apart and she would sneak out, spying on him as he met up with other men in car parks across western Sydney, or, less often, at their homes.

I would sneak out of the house at two or three in the morning if I had a feeling something was happening. If you suspect anything and you care enough about that person...you find out ways to deal with it.

Many of The Crew's meeting places must have been covered by CCTV, Soraya said.

"We're talking about parking lots in someone's work place - you could easily see shit on CCTV, if you were really looking," Soraya said.

"I believe the federal police already know half of it and they're waiting to catch the big person, but you know what happens when you wait to catch the big person? The little person gets eaten up."

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Whatsapp A militant identified as "Jihadi John".

Members of The Crew shared phone numbers for people in Syria and Iraq, along with Islamic State's propaganda films showing beheadings and other violent deaths. Some of these films featured killings by "Jihadi John", the British Islamic State fighter Mohammed Emwazi who is believed to have been killed in a drone strike in November 2014.

Without The Crew, many of whose members are still thought to be at large in Sydney, Soraya said Abed would never have been put in direct contact with Islamic State.

Soraya said there are loved ones who might give up on a recruit at that point - they feel that it would be too late to intervene.

"[They say] 'I don't care, what am I supposed to do about it? Khalas, that's it, they're gone. I can't change it, I've tried, let them go'," Soraya said. But she winced at the idea of giving up on someone.

'You have to be willing to give up part of yourself'

It wasn't ever the imams or the mashuras - gatherings at the mosque - that pushed Abed in the direction of violent extremism, Soraya said, but other attendees. The mosque's management has come out many times to condemn Islamic State.

Sheik Abu Adnan, from the Markaz Imam Ahmad mosque, said the mosque liaises closely with the local community to address the ideologies of the terrorist group Islamic State, which is occupying parts of Syria and Iraq.

Mosques are open to the public. Anyone can come and go.

"We are working hard and closely with our community to eradicate this kind of ideology," Sheikh Abu Adnan, who is based at the Liverpool mosque in southwestern Sydney, recently told the Australian.

Abed was still "transitioning" mid-last year, and recruiters had threatened to kill him if he turned back. Others told him that god would love him for advancing the cause of the caliphate, or region of the Middle East currently under the self-declared rule of Islamic State.

"They tell them 'I swear, Allah will love you if you do this, I swear you're going to go to heaven and Allah will love you more by giving you things, and you're one of us'," Soraya said.

Sometimes, when trying to "get through" to Abed, Soraya self-harmed. She admitted to using emotional blackmail to rein him in.

I couldn't change his mind, but I could create doubt and I could grab him by his feet and kiss them and beg him to love me more than he loved killing somebody else.

"I can't tell you the amount of times I have hit myself without doing it on purpose, no conscious doing...I didn't know what I was doing, I had to do whatever I was doing out of desperation."

She went against her moral compass every day. "You cheat, you lie, you spy, you swear, you emotionally blackmail - you have to be willing to give up part of yourself."

Soraya is concerned about the lack of support for people who are faced with loved ones wanting to join groups like IS, and said there are many silent victims like herself.

"How do I feel confident to go to a counsellor and say this is what's happening?" she said.

"I disconnected from my own family, my own support group, to get him to connect with me and other people."

'I died every single day trying to stop it'

Soon after Abed's plane destined for Turkey had left without him, Soraya confronted him.

"That fight was so bad and so big. I felt a sense of abandonment."

She said all it took was an apology. And a promise that he wouldn't go. Today, Abed is in Sydney and in touch with the right people, including one respected sheikh who is helping to guide him away from ideas of violent extremism.

The couple are no longer together, and looking back, Soraya said she "gave up her life" during the relationship.

"Do I miss him? Yeah, I miss him a lot. He was my best friend."

Despite the cost, Soraya remains passionately convinced she did the right thing.

"I don't think people understand what's involved in that. You can't band-aid those things."

Putting it bluntly, she says Islamic State screwed with her boyfriend and "I unf***ked his mind".

I had to be smart and on the ball all the time. I gave up my life. It's still so raw to me...I was hardly around my family - they could never know about anything that was happening. You stop trusting people.

Soraya, who wears the headscarf, said it upsets her when people lump all Muslims into the same IS-sympathising category.

"It makes me angry that I have to walk in the street and someone has to look at me like I'm the cause of other people's physical deaths when I just look at them and (think) I wish you knew I died every single day trying to stop it."

A version of this story written by Jennine Khalik and Dan Box was first published in the Australian newspaper. This feature was written for Hack by Jennine and gives a more personal account.

You can contact Jennine on Twitter.