This eastern region, commonly referred to in Syria as the Remote Provinces, is distinctly tribal, rural, and marginalized. In the 1990s, life there was generally simple and uneventful: The state’s presence was minimal, and villagers sustained themselves through farming and remittances from relatives working in the Persian Gulf. Even in retrospect, nothing in those days indicated that my home province would become the main transit hub for jihadists moving from Syria into Iraq after the 2003 invasion, or the site of the Islamic State’s final battle as a caliphate.

As someone who studies the Islamic State for a living, I still struggle to connect images from my past with the reality of today. They are simply two different worlds.

A little over a month after ISIS seized Ash Sha’fa, one of my siblings sent me a picture of our father. I froze at the sight of him with a gray beard. He used to be clean-shaven. But he, like other men living under the caliphate, was forced to wear a beard as a sign of his adherence to the religious principles of his jihadist rulers. This was five years ago, by which point I was already studying ISIS’s every move as a journalist in Abu Dhabi; the photograph made me feel the group’s terrors and daily humiliations in a new way.

In the context of the Syrian conflict, my family’s plight was not extreme; nor did my immediate family produce active participants in the many-sided war. But their story still provides a window into the country’s tragedy, and into how a society can be radically transformed in a matter of years.

When the Syrian conflict started, fighting and bombardments in the village were minimal, as clashes tended to be concentrated in the urban centers. But schools closed, as did many nearby hospitals. And the economic situation deteriorated rapidly. When ISIS swept through eastern Syria and western Iraq in June 2014, the ragtag militias that used to operate in Deir Ezzor vanished and were replaced by ISIS representatives who acted like a state security force.

ISIS militants seized properties belonging to the government or to individuals they deemed apostates. They constructed bases in those facilities. ISIS then widened its writ dramatically. Unlike the regime before the war, ISIS was highly visible. It micromanaged the areas under its control, down to family feuds that had once been resolved through tribal codes.

Before the uprising, my village did not even have a police station, and official paperwork had to be submitted in adjacent cities. ISIS, however, established centers for hisbah (the religious police) and tribal outreach in every village. Its fighters patrolled the areas, and a traveler from my village to the main city would encounter several checkpoints along the way, instead of just one, as was previously the case, at the bridge linking the eastern and western banks of the Euphrates, near Albu Kamal.