ANTAKYA, Turkey — The cigarette smoke in the hotel room grew as thick as the cottony fog outside in this Turkish border town, as Syrian men, night after night, told their war stories. Their memories veered from exhilaration to black humor to terror, but mostly they told of what they had lost: Friends. A fiancée. An arm. A country. None were out of their mid-20s.

Three were insurgents, or had been. One had helped capture an army tank; another had hidden in tall grass as tank fire killed his raiding party. They told of abandoning one insurgent group after another, finding commanders too violent, too corrupt, too disorganized, too pious, not pious enough.

Three others, civilian antigovernment activists who broadcast war news on social media, were on the run from Islamic State extremists. For them, the fog was a comfort, shrouding their movements as they drove to the hotel. They had trekked for days from the remote Syrian provincial capital of Deir al-Zour, holding their breath at Islamic State checkpoints, hoping to find safety here in southern Turkey.

But they still felt hunted, sure that the group had eyes and ears everywhere, among bearded strangers in Syrian-run cafes or in hotels welcoming foreign fighters. They did not tell friends where they were staying, and they did not know when or whether they could go home.