Will Hammond thought he was as far away from the Middle East as he could get.

An Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, the 35-year-old Hammond now works as a field engineer in Alberta, Canada. So he was taken aback when a friend and fellow veteran posted an ISIS recruitment video on Facebook — and Hammond saw himself in the clip.

“I was shocked,” Hammond said. “It’s not every day you find yourself in propaganda.”

“No Respite” was posted online by the terror group in late November. In the four-minute animated video, a deep-voiced narrator with an unplaceable accent begins with a boast about the geographical size of the Islamic State and some potshots at US presidents (George W. Bush is a “liar,” Bill Clinton a “fornicator”) before taunting American soldiers about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the suicide rates among returning veterans.

Hammond appears at the 2:38 mark. He’s in a photo taken at the base of a hill in Afghanistan in 2006. Two soldiers are in the open bed of a small truck. Their heads are bandaged. Hammond is on the far right, holding a rifle.

The two soldiers were attacked while delivering food and water to an observation post 2,000 feet above their base in the mountains of Afghanistan. Hammond, a supply officer, was escorting the wounded soldiers to a landing zone so they could get to a hospital. Here’s how he tells it: “We had sent some donkeys up to an OP. The bad guys stabbed our donkeys so we sent a platoon up the trail and they got ambushed.”

The photo, taken by photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg, was named one of Time magazine’s best of 2006, which is likely how ISIS found it. But if those video producers hoped to provoke American soldiers, they found the wrong target in the low-key Hammond. He was more impressed with the technical chops of the ISIS video editors than he was angered by its anti-American-soldier message.

“I thought the production was very good,” Hammond said. “It reminded me of a National Guard commercial you’d see before a movie.”

The slick video production skills ISIS is known for are on display in this video.

The video quality in “No Respite” is on par with what you see on television, says Duy Lihn Tu, a Columbia journalism school professor and video producer.

“It’s almost like an ESPN highlight film or pregame package,” Tu said. “The message is reprehensible in my opinion but the production values are top-notch.”

With today’s technology, ISIS doesn’t need a big budget to produce high-quality digital videos like this. Software suites like Adobe can turn a talented editor into a one-man Steven Spielberg.

“You don’t need a production studio,” Tu said. “You can do it on a laptop.”

The line between professional and amateur in the industry has been blurred, but Tu said there is no doubt that the ISIS video is the work of someone with considerable experience and highly developed skills in design and animation programs, storyboarding and marketing.

“The message is very clear and the storytelling is sophisticated,” Tu said.

The ability of ISIS to deliver that message so effectively is what Hammond found most troubling about the video he had a cameo in.

“What’s scary about this video is that it’s specifically for folks in the West who are disenfranchised who are idealistic and naive enough to believe in something like ISIS,” Hammond said. “It’s in the same vein as kids who sign up to the Marines to go fight in the Middle East. It’s the same kind of idealism.”

Hammond, who served a year in Iraq and 16 months in Afghanistan, doesn’t want the United States to be goaded into another war in the Middle East. Instead, he thinks the best solution is to work with Russia, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia to contain the terror group.

“We tried to send troops in Iraq for 10 years and it didn’t work,” he said.

He joked that one thing he would like to go after the ISIS jihadis for is using his likeness without his permission.

“I wish I could sue them for royalties,” Hammond said. “I’m here in northern Canada in the middle of nowhere.”