The message came via Facebook unexpectedly late on a recent Friday night when my son was safely asleep and my apartment in Paris was silent except for the whir of the dishwasher.

“Janine . . . you were probably one of the last people to see my son alive . . . I would like to know more . . . We miss him very much.”

The words were sent from Miami by Art Sotloff, whose son, Steven, a young and talented freelance journalist, was beheaded by the radical group ISIS in Syria in 2014. Art had just seen a documentary, 7 Days in Syria, that I made with several of my colleagues, in which his son briefly appears. Steve was smart, funny, and kind. He spoke Arabic. He had worked in Yemen and Libya and had gone to Aleppo to report on the carnage firsthand. For that, his fate led him to a lonely desert with a gruesome murderer known as Jihadi John. A few weeks earlier, the gentle and much-loved reporter Jim Foley had met the same terrible fate.

As I read Art’s message, I had a painful déjà vu: I had received a Facebook message from Steve a few days after he was kidnapped, in August 2013. But when I clicked on that message, it was not Steve who was writing me from inside Syria, but another colleague, Barak Barfi, who had gotten access to Steve’s computer. It took me a while to register what Barak was saying. Steve had gone “dark”—code for missing. Did I have any idea where he was planning to go and who he was with? When our colleagues disappear, there is a slow, agonizing piecing-together of precious details that might bring them back alive.

I have been a war reporter for 25 years, and this is what it has come to: the realization that if you continue, you might be kidnapped, you might die. We always knew we took risks; we always tried to minimize those risks as best we could. But the war in Syria, and the rise of ISIS, have changed all that.

I had met Steve in Aleppo on a freezing December afternoon, when stinking garbage was piled on the streets and people were selling plastic juice cartons of petrol. The shelling by government forces was heavy; there was not much food, electricity, or water. Hospitals kept getting bombed. There were no official schools, and the beautiful ancient buildings of Aleppo that had once been part of the Silk Road had been blitzed into rubble. There was such sorrow in the eyes of people, such rightful anger, such fear that nothing could make the nightmare stop.