We hauled our gear aboard the rickety metal ferry and with the engine roaring we set off across the River Tigris, leaving Iraq behind and sailing towards Syria.

The trip is just a couple of hundred yards and it takes no more than a few minutes. Yet this journey was more than three years in the making.

ABC News senior foreign correspondent Ian Pannell reports from Raqqa, Syria. (Courtesy Ted Turner) More

When the Syrian revolution began in 2011, we started to cross into the country to report on the uprising. The trips were often difficult and dangerous -- sneaking under barbed wire, hiking over hills, meeting smuggler contacts, trying to avoid regime checkpoints and traveling with heavily armed rebel fighters.

By mid-2012 it became clear that the leaders of the free world were largely indifferent to the desperate plight of those paying in blood to try to win their own freedom. At least, they were unprepared to do much about it.

The vacuum was filled by battle-hardened extremists. Some were local fighters but increasing numbers were foreign jihadis. The breakdown in law and order, the growing violence and increasing desperation in Syria provided fertile territory for these religious radicals, who began to flock across the porous border with Turkey in ever growing numbers.

I remember talking to a moderate rebel commander at a base in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, as the battle raged against regime troops. Dr. Abdul Raouf Al-Kraym was a Rotarian revolutionary, one of the wealthy industrialists who bankrolled the early days of the uprising. He puffed on his pipe, blowing large plumes of fragrant blue smoke into the air as he told me how he was happy to accept assistance from the men in black when the West offered him none. He assured me they could be controlled and contained.

He was wrong.

By late 2014, ISIS had consolidated its control of large swathes of the north. Journalists, aid workers, opposition activists and fighters were all rounded up, imprisoned, beaten and in many cases killed with a level of barbarism that shocked the world.

This trip was a long-awaited chance to get back on Syrian soil, to see the country first hand, to witness the devastation that ISIS occupation had brought and to assess the battle to rid this land of the militants for good.

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Inside a formerly ISIS-occupied building in the western suburbs of Raqqa, Syria

A funeral held in a community in Raqqa, Syria. (Courtesy Ted Turner) More

ISIS named Raqqa the capital of their caliphate three years ago. It has taken a coalition of Kurds, Arabs and ethnic Christian groups to take on the fight against the militants. They have done most of the fighting -- and most of the dying. We witnessed a funeral for four volunteer soldiers, all from the same town, who were being buried on the same day. Here, they are celebrated as “Shaheed,” which means “martyrs.”

One mother at the cemetery mourned the loss of her son, a child-soldier who had lied about his age to join the war.

“I was angry because he was too young for war, to face the enemy with a weapon," she said through tears. Mahmoud was just 13 years old when he was killed by ISIS.

Neda, a 5-year-old who had lost her father in the fighting, vowed to avenge her father’s death. (Courtesy Ted Turner) More

Childhood ends early here and the young must learn quickly how to grieve. Neda's father was one of the fighters killed. At just 5 years old, she has known nothing but war, and without hesitating, she vowed to avenge her father’s death.

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