Kevin Dawes has now been freed by the Syrian regime having been abducted after traveling to the country in 2012, according to two U.S. officials. The Washington Post reports that Dawes was recently allowed to telephone his family and receive care packages.

In the early hours of 21 September 2012, Kevin Dawes arrived at a hotel on the outskirts of the Turkish border city of Antakya on a mission to get into Syria. Lugging a helmet, a suitcase full of medical supplies and a bulletproof vest, the wiry, self-taught Korean-American had already attracted attention at the airports he passed through. Likely, he thought, he was already being tailed; after two days of travelling from his home in San Diego he was too tired to care. "Fell asleep, woke up," he tapped to a friend online later that day. "Feels like Ewoks beat me up." At least there was Wi-Fi. Over the next two weeks Dawes would fire off thousands of direct messages via Twitter from his hotel room to the only two people still talking to him, neither of whom he'd ever met.

He'd met one of those "friends" on somethingawful.com, a comedy website whose regulars like to call themselves goons and which was a good part of the reason he was here. Dawes preferred to hang out on its more ghoulish, conspiracy-mongering forums; one of his favourites, dedicated to military matters, was called "goons in platoons". On the site, Dawes called himself "Caro"; after he got banned for trolling, he came back as "Caro Ascendant". The previous year, when he'd announced his intention to travel to revolutionary Libya to be a photojournalist and deliver medicine, the response among his enemies there had been "LOL". But Dawes had gone anyway and come home with YouTube footage to tell the tale. Now they were sniggering about his Syria plans. He was going to do the same again.

Everything in the past year had been leading up to this moment - this hotel room. But now everything was turning bad and everyone was conspiring against him. A Kickstarter project he'd set up to crowd-fund a drone to fly over northern Syria and report back on the state of the conflict attracted only $30, and was wound up after 45 days (the goal was $28,000). Dawes had been promised transport to rebel-held Aleppo - the new crucible of the insurgency in the north - by friends he'd met online, but they hadn't shown up. "My contact fing vanished. I might be doing this on foot." A few days into his stay he befriended a young Canadian at the hotel who was now living in the room next to him and giving him advice. "I'm an aid worker and doctor to him. He's a desperate writer is what he said." On various occasions he contemplated calling the whole mission off. "I have no fing idea how I'm going to get into Syria," he admitted. "Might be time for a strategic withdrawal." But he couldn't back down now; he'd told too many people where he was headed to bail. "No longer have an abort limit," he typed. He knew the risks. "And if I get blown up? No replay."

If Dawes' new Canadian friend was a hopeful nonprofessional trying his hand at war reporting, he wasn't the only one. Given his precarious mental state, Dawes should never have been near a warzone. If it wasn't for the internet's spirit of can-do amateurism and the web of connections it opened up, he probably would have stayed at home. Over several years he'd convinced himself that his grandmother had been in the CIA and that a secretive network in the same organisation had tortured him, quietly sterilised him and done all sorts of other unspeakable things to get him to do their bidding. Aided by tiny computer chips and cameras, and by mysterious suggestions delivered during his sleep, they'd tried to brainwash him and otherwise mess with his head. They had planted tramps around his house to keep an eye on him; now they wanted him for a top-secret CIA stud farm. To do something about it, he'd taken a cab to the Russian Federation embassy in Washington, but they'd "told me to f*** off at the gate".

The fug of paranoid delusions was back now, settling everywhere and obscuring everything. The phantasmagoric trail of messages Dawes left behind show one man's rapid psychological descent, free falling into the abyss of his own psyche. Out jogging one evening he'd come face-to-face with a spook. "He surprised me; I surprised him. The first thing he did was harden his face and raise a wrench, then I said: 'Hello, my name is Kevin.'" They were closing in, all of them, and he just wanted it to be over. Then there was that "Canadian" kid; by now his nationality was in inverted commas and he was under suspicion as a possible spy. "Kid is downstairs pretending to read a Turkish newspaper," he noted on 1 October 2012. "And I have a date in Syria I cannot afford to miss."

A few days later Dawes checked out of his hotel and jumped off the precipice into the battle-ravaged anarchy of northern Syria.

Apart from one chilling, tantalising alleged sighting a year later, nothing has been heard from him since. What appears to be his last ever Twitter DM, to the friend from Something Awful, whom he'd now come to believe was another CIA stooge, was as determined as it was ominous. "We'll see where this goes. This obscenity has to end."

As Syria's home-grown revolt catapulted into civil war in 2012, the Syrian regime lost control of much of the north of the country. A freelance army of medics, journalists and fighters charged across the border from Turkey, ready to go where most organisations feared to tread.

In a way, I was one of them. After being denied a visa by the Syrian regime I took quite a few trips into northern Syria in the summer of 2012, along the same route that Dawes hoped to go. No one was checking who I was; almost all the visitors were instinctively pro-rebel and the locals seemed glad of their help. In the lonely band of Syria reporters, like base jumpers or high-wire walkers, everyone quickly became aware of everyone else. For many among this new crew of freelance reporters, Syria was a natural progression from Libya. There was plenty of work to go around and some trailblazing success stories. In May, a former American marine called Austin Tice crossed into rebel-held Syria and spent two months travelling the length of the country, eventually writing for upmarket papers, such as the Washington Post.

But while most of these new arrivals were real reporters earning their spurs, there was a worrying new development - the presence of adrenaline-junkies, adventurers, fantasists or crazy narcissists who shouldn't have been in Libya or Syria in the first place.

Professional journalists quickly got to hear about them too, and one of them was Dawes. "Guess where I'm going on the 16th! It's Misrata, Libya. Say it with me people. Pulitzer. Motherf***ing. Prize," he wrote on Something Awful on 12 May 2011. At the same time, he posted photos of himself with a medical drip sticking out of his arm. "I learned how to do this by ordering medical supplies online and watching a self-IV tutorial on YouTube. The internet rocks."

A month later he was at a rebel medical station in Misrata, ducking to avoid relentless shelling and Gaddafi-regime snipers who were shooting directly at him. It was while working here that he met Dr Tameem Abu Gharsa, a burly, well-liked local doctor who'd become his best friend in Libya. Under Abu Gharsa's supervision, Dawes irrigated wounds, cut off clothes, ran IV lines and held the light; he also handed over the medical supplies he'd bought out of his own pocket. As their friendship grew, he joined Abu Gharsa's crew in a roving ambulance, driving up and down the front line looking for wounded fighters to treat. For all his Walter Mittyish self-mythology, there's no question that he was really in Misrata.

In one Al Jazeera broadcast from a rebel field hospital, he can be seen in the background, helmeted and hovering around the stretchers as the reporter says his piece to camera.

Dawes also had time to upload 300 videos to his own YouTube channel, most of which he later removed from the public web. His more private videos record his doubts and reflections and amount to an atmospheric video diary of his time there. His silver-rimmed, nerdy glasses and thin moustache sit oddly with his military fatigues; his voice has the measured, lucid tones of a seasoned documentarian. In one, Dawes sits atop an unused anti-aircraft battery and sets his camera on the gun, twisting it around and mimicking the boom-boom-boom of it firing. In another he frets about his debts: "I'm 40,000 in the hole with the good old credit card company at the moment; that's how I paid for this trip." He also worries about what the hell he's up to and about his limited skill set. "Every day I wake up and I say to myself, 'I'm in so far over my head there is no way that I'll get any of this done, let alone get out of this intact' and yet I do. Maybe this is the career for me. Maybe, maybe."

In July 2011, Dawes left for the United States, but by the following month he was back and in the thick of the fighting around the Libyan regime stronghold of Sirte. By now he'd ditched the Joe 90 look and was wearing wraparound Oakley sunglasses. He'd also acquired a sniper rifle - in some of his footage he can be seen firing it and using the zoom on his camera to pick out snipers and direct artillery to enemy positions. A good few locals and some conspiracy theorists online assumed he was a CIA agent, part of some hush-hush, black-ops mission to train the Libyan rebels. But no real spook would have taken so much incriminating footage.

Dawes' video of the ferocious street-by-street fighting in Sirte has all the attitude and adventure of a Vice documentary, primed to go viral. In one sequence he talks about being almost killed by an incoming RPG after one of his muzzle blasts gave a rebel away. Another, speechless, shows the monumental thunderclap of artillery and flashes of lightning from the firing of heavy guns; beaten-up, graffiti-daubed rebel trucks move around fields in formation, like something from Mad Max. For all his sulky disaffection, Dawes was starring in a shaky-cam movie of his own making, in which he's the lead and clearly having the time of his life. Hurtling down a road with his fellow medics he takes a potshot at a passing ostrich and catches it in the leg. "Nice shot, Kevin," says one of his comrades, and they slow down to sling it, still alive but tied up, into the back of the truck. Later, they'll have it for dinner.

Journalists gave him a wide berth. Dawes was claiming to be a freelance photographer, but to professional journalists it wasn't clear what he was - and it made them uncomfortable. On 12 October those differences exploded into the open in the most dangerous situation possible. When his doctor friend Tameem Abu Gharsa ducked into a street to get a shot at a machine-gunner that had his medical unit pinned down - by now he was carrying a weapon too - he took a bullet in the leg. Dawes and a few others waded in to drag him to safety, cut off his trousers and apply a tourniquet. But when Dawes took the tourniquet off and began applying one of his own, André Liohn, a Brazilian photojournalist for Der Spiegel and Newsweek who was on the scene, ordered him to stop. "I was replacing it with one of my much better tourniquets," said Dawes afterwards.

It didn't look that way to Liohn. When I called him at his home in Italy, he told me that he had a bad feeling about Dawes from the beginning. "I saw this guy walking towards me, and he was in full Rambo gear. He had a bulletproof vest, helmet, a sniper Kalashnikov, hand grenades on his chest and just a vest to show off his muscles. I thought, 'What the f***?'"

As for the tourniquet, "He had no idea how to use that shit." To get the doctor to safety, all of them had to scurry down alleys, clinging very close to the wall to avoid the bullets. "I could feel the shrapnel in my back, hot metal at my neck," remembers Liohn. "Kevin was in front of us, not knowing what to do. I kicked him really hard in the ass." The problem with Dawes, reflected Liohn, is that "he arrived first saying that he was a journalist. From a journalist he became a paramedic and from a paramedic he became a semi-fighter. I think he was just having hallucinations, you know? And putting everyone at risk."

Liohn was further irked when, later on, Dawes came back and began riling him. There was some shoving and it quickly became heated; according to Liohn, Dawes was pushing him into the line of fire. When he heard Dawes cocking his weapon, Liohn snapped; he jumped on top of him, pulled off his helmet and began hitting him in the face with his camera. The rebels who were travelling with Liohn quickly separated them, but they were from a different militia; when Liohn told them that Dawes was a liability they arrested him on the spot. Dawes ended up being held for several days and was ordered to turn in his weapon - he could stay as a journalist or an aid worker, they said, or go home. Soon after, he did return home, but he continued stalking Liohn on the net, threatening him and claiming he knew where he lived. Liohn concluded that Dawes was psychotic and dangerous to know. "When I heard he disappeared in Syria," he told me, "I was very happy."

Of course, Dawes wasn't the first freelancer to disappear in Syria. That was Austin Tice, who disappeared in August 2012. When a heavily staged video of Tice being threatened on a Syrian hillside popped up on the internet, most people assumed he was in the custody of the Syrian regime.

In September, another freelance American writer, Theo Padnos, was kidnapped and handed over to al-Qaeda almost as soon as he crossed the border. Like many others, Tice and Padnos had started out in Antakya, 20 kilometres from the Syrian border and a genteel antechamber before the chaos of northern Syria. So had James Foley, the American freelancer who'd been kidnapped in November and executed by Isis nearly two years later. Some journalists may even have run into Dawes while they were there; Foley had already met him in Libya. ("An American who's been hanging around Misrata fighters for several months," Foley wrote in an article at the time, "Dawes said he originally came to Libya to start as a journalist and has ended up volunteering as a medic and a fighter.") From his hotel room in Antakya, Dawes was well aware of what happened to Tice, but in his delusional state he thought he could do better and might even be able to help with information gathering. "An Austin Tice rescue is on the agenda," he wrote to his confidant from Something Awful. "Hardest part will be intel gathering. So it's on me, then. And yes I can."

The first time I heard of Dawes was in the summer of 2013.

Together with another journalist I'd met in rebel-held Syria, I was running through the burgeoning list of missing journalists - I was investigating the subject for a book - when his name came up.

Shortly after came news of another foreigner who'd travelled into northern Syria around the same time and been kidnapped, a qualified British surgeon called Abbas Khan. Khan had made it to Aleppo, but no sooner had he arrived than he was nabbed by the Syrian army and sent to Damascus. His mother, Fatima, had courageously travelled to Syria to find him; eventually she'd located him within Syria's labyrinthine network of political prisons and spoken to him in person. Just as he was about to be released in December 2013, however, he was found dead in his cell. Most people, including the British Foreign Office and the coroner at an official inquest, concluded that he'd quietly been killed by the Syrian regime.

It made me wonder whether he might have come across Austin Tice.

I phoned Fatima Khan and asked if her son mentioned any Americans he'd come across in prison. "I know what you want," she said without any hesitation. "And yes: Kevin Dawes."

In March 2014, I travelled to her home in the London suburbs to find out more. It was a difficult meeting. Fatima was still raw with grief and angry with journalists, as well as the British government, elements of which she felt must have colluded in the death of her son. As soon as I mentioned Dawes, she asked me to turn my tape off. The communal cells Abbas Khan was being held in at the time measured about six metres by six and held between 30 and 40 people. Her son, according to Fatima, told her that he'd heard Dawes' voice from a few cells away.

Since there was no one else who spoke English, they'd begun a conversation. Dawes was in a bad state; he seemed like he wanted to die and may have said as much. Before long the guards came in and beat them both for talking, after which their communication came to an end. "But they made a pact," according to Fatima, "that whichever one got out first would let people know where they were."

And one detail she remembered very well: Kevin was saying, and wanted it to be known, that he was a journalist.

Could she have been mistaken, or otherwise misinformed? It seems unlikely. Some months after he disappeared, Dawes was listed as missing in Syria on the FBI's website and Fatima Khan has every reason to hate the Syrian regime; after all, its agents appear to have killed her son. But in a separate interview at his home, another of Fatima's sons told me the same story as she'd explained it to him - adding that his mother had informed the Czech Embassy in Damascus, which represents American interests in Syria, at the time. If anyone wanted to make mischief by falsely accusing the Syrian regime of holding an American, they would surely have chosen Austin Tice, whose sterling work as a journalist has made his disappearance a cause célèbre. No one was interested in Kevin Dawes.

One interested party who did pay attention when he saw Dawes on the FBI's missing persons list was Eliot Higgins. Higgins was one of the two people left communicating with Dawes in his Antakya hotel room, and his correspondent from Something Awful. Honing internet skills he picked up there, together with his interest in weaponry and his forensic, ferret-like eye for good visuals, Higgins went on to become famous, pioneering a whole new genre of open-source investigation of warzone footage, everywhere from Syria to Ukraine, but he still feels terrible about what happened to Dawes. When I met him for coffee in central London he pulled out his mobile phone and showed me a long list of direct messages on his Twitter account. On a single day in September 2012, Dawes had sent him 150 messages.

After a while, like some others that I spoke to, he simply stopped reading them. Higgins had only come across Dawes because he was a moderator on Something Awful. When Dawes came back from Libya he interviewed him for his website; all he could talk about, according to Higgins, was going to Syria. He was becoming increasingly distressed. Then, in his Antakya hotel room, he appears to have had a complete breakdown. Higgins knew that if he criticised Dawes' plans, he'd turn on him too - so he tried to keep in touch and talk him down gently. It didn't work. The last message he received from Dawes he took as a direct threat to his family.

There were reasons to take it seriously. Dawes had boasted about his facility with weapons and complained that his gun rights at home had been taken away by a court order. "Right before this trip began," he says, in one of his Libya video diaries, "I got royally f***ed by some sketchy judicial manoeuvres that I'm going to have to have an attorney undo... this is regarding my firearms. It's a restraining order." Higgins' most immediate worry was that Dawes was going to get himself killed on the way into Syria or that he'd kill someone else. "I said there are mines on that border. His whole plan was to crawl across the minefield and stab them with a stick."

The locals, whom Dawes met as he prepared to cross the Syrian border, came away with the same impression. In the summer of 2014 I returned to Antakya at the Turkish-Syrian border in an effort to retrace his steps. My first lead came from Mahmoud Sheikh al-Zour, a weary, bespectacled veteran in his fifties who once ran his own training camp in northern Syria and who'd accompanied Austin Tice inside the country. He was also, it turned out, the smuggler Dawes had tried to engage to help him across the border. One day, Dawes had showed up to his hotel with a Canadian, telling him he needed to be in Syria.

As a confidence-building measure, he'd brought along pictures of himself in a Libyan ambulance. While he was waiting, he'd also tried to solicit al-Zour's help in a project which would use "some mathematical stuff" to create an air vortex over areas of northern Syria; al-Zour nodded his head a good deal before explaining that he was going to have to turn this opportunity down. "He had crazy ideas about what he can do. It was like a dream. He was not all right - why would I want to take him with me to Syria?" The last time Dawes came to see him, it was to beg for money to pay for his hotel.

That hotel wasn't in Antakya but in Harbiye, a pretty outlying suburb overlooking a valley five miles closer to Syria. After several days of looking, I found it. I arrived in Harbiye in the morning, to get ahead of the intense heat, and at the third hotel I found an old man standing around in the lobby with his son, helping his staff mop the floors. The father, who didn't speak any English, recognised the picture immediately. Via his son he explained that this man had been here about two years previously and had stayed between ten and 15 days. He looked Chinese, but had an American passport. He was often in the company of another man, he remembered, who was tall with blond hair and a goatee beard; it must have been the Canadian. "I am a doctor. I am helping Syria," Dawes had said. It was clear that he also wanted to go there, said the old man, who'd tried to talk him out of it. "I think Kevin went," he said.

From behind his reception booth the old man began checking records to find a copy of his passport, but to no avail. He was very interested in the case and curious as to why no one had asked about it before. "That was two years ago," he said. "The American government is very strong - why didn't they contact us? No one contacted us. No one." From the beginning, he said, it was clear that Dawes was penniless. When he left, the other man had paid his bill on his credit card and then gone home. The old man mumbled something and sighed. "A lot of people pass through here on their way to Syria," his son translated: it was clear that he was talking about jihadis. But Dawes was different. "He had a strange look in his eye and strange movements. He was too relaxed, crazy relaxed - he didn't speak, just sat with his arms folded, not saying anything."

He and his son began gesticulating, as if in the throes of a political argument, at the end of which the father asked me if Dawes was a mujahid, a young man looking to wage jihad in Syria. "If he wanted to go to Syria," he said, there are two choices - either he was a mujahid, or a medical man. "If he is not a medical man, I think he is a mujahid."

Kevin Dawes was no mujahid and had no plans to carry a weapon in Syria. Neither, quite obviously, was he CIA. On the FBI's list of missing persons website his occupation is listed as a "freelance photographer", but that really doesn't cover it.

Neither is it likely to have convinced the Syrian authorities.

Torturers have Google too. Sometime in 2013, according to Fatima Khan's information, Dawes was being held in the Palestine Branch, an infamous political prison in the Syrian capital of Damascus, the same place where, according to Amnesty International, the CIA liked to send Syrian Islamists after they'd finished with them during the "War on Terror".

On trips to Damascus and the region I've met many Syrians and a few foreign journalists who believe Dawes and Khan were held there.

The foreign journalists were held incommunicado in tiny cells but not mistreated. The Syrians I spoke to were held in large communal rooms and spoke of regular, brutal beatings; among other things, they'd been burnt with cigarette butts. The most popular accusation, levelled like a mantra at almost everyone, was that they were secretly working for the CIA or Mossad. If Dawes was really here, treating his interrogators to wild but elaborate fantasies about the CIA, he might, for the first time, have found an avid audience.

In August 2014, a team of FBI special agents travelled to the UK to seek out information about Dawes and spoke to anyone who'd talk to them. Around the same time, or shortly afterwards, the team travelled to Lebanon where they spent time with the Syrian activist Dawes met on Twitter and who referred him to Mahmoud Sheikh al-Zour. It's very likely that they also went to Turkey; by now they might even have made it to his hotel. There was no love lost between Dawes and the FBI; they figured in his paranoid conspiracy too. Dawes' last authored, public tweet, published on 14 September 2012, appeared to come from nowhere: "Remember, FBI stands for 'Shoots the wrong people, very racist all the time even when trying to be nice, will betray you'. Never forget." All the same, his American passport might be Dawes' best hope of making it out alive.

A report in the French newspaper Le Figaroin March 2015 suggested that the American and Syrian governments were - in a rare breach of current protocol - in direct negotiation over the fate of an American held in a Syrian prison and that "an emissary representing the US government" had visited the imprisoned journalist. The reporter, citing an unnamed European diplomat, seemed to think that any discussions concerned only Austin Tice, but that may not have been the case. Independently, several confidential sources told me that the prisoner at immediate issue was not Austin Tice but Kevin Dawes.

The best way to bring Dawes home might be to admit that he and many others shouldn't have been in Syria at all. When Dawes returned from Libya, Eliot Higgins reported him to the FBI. Such was Dawes' deteriorating state that Higgins worried he might wake up one morning and go shoot up a local school. André Liohn contacted the FBI too, worried about the threat to him and his family. "I never got an answer, but they received my email," he told me. Both conclude that the US needs better mental health care, but the issues raised in cases like Dawes run deeper than that.

Experiencing war at close quarters has always been attractive to young men who want to prove themselves, carry a weapon or just get some life experience under their belts.

The numbers of young men heading to Syria, however, have become so plentiful as to represent a new, dangerous direction in youth culture. While many have gone to Syria to help, others have not - the cocktail, at the extremes, of misguided idealism and mental illness has proven murderously unhelpful to the resolution of the conflict.

There are now around 25,000 foreign jihadis on Syrian soil. On top of that are their governments - which now include Russia - trying to bomb them from a great height. It's a little too late for that. For some years now, young men with European accents and puffed up with puritanical purpose have been kidnapping and cutting the heads off ordinary Shia and Alawi Muslims in Syria.

Until they began to do the same to Western journalists and aid workers, no one cared. The many-layered conflict playing out in Syria is now substantially about other people's problems, with the country as a convenient backdrop. One of the few things that Syrians on both sides can agree about, in fact, is that parts of their country have become a Disneyland for Kalashnikov-waving foreigners, a dumping ground for the disturbed.

But what happened to Kevin Dawes is also a cautionary tale of geekery gone wrong. Dawes hadn't only drunk the Kool-Aid of this brave new digital future; he'd injected it into his veins, like the IV drips he'd learned how to use on YouTube.

Eliot Higgins used his apprenticeship in the internet's rougher, more knockabout playgrounds to do something useful and new; all it did for Dawes was help him disappear into his own twisted delirium.

Behind the firewalled stockade of his own paranoia, Dawes had come to believe that the whole world was against him. Randall Hendricks, the other person Dawes was in communication with from his Antakya hotel room, got to know Dawes when he sent a message to his YouTube channel. After Dawes got back from Libya, Hendricks planned to meet him in San Diego, but broke off all contact after Dawes offered to come sweep his house for bugs planted by the CIA. The abuse he endured from his fellow goons on Something Awful, insists Hendricks, was a "major motivation" for Dawes wanting to go to Syria - he wanted to prove everyone wrong.

It would be wrong to view Dawes, as he often did, only through the window of his activity on the net. When I called his Libyan doctor friend Tameem Abu Gharsa he was still in Misrata and still recovering from the gunshot wound to his leg; he was only talking to me because he thought some publicity might help Dawes' cause.

Dawes had many crazy delusions about the CIA, he agreed, but he and his colleagues had just ignored them - he was entirely dependable in a tight spot and his heart was in the right place. "It was a very rare act to pay everything you have to give to people, all your expenses. He gave a lot of his money away for free."

When I asked him whether Dawes was a journalist, medic or a fighter in Libya, he replied as if he'd been thinking about it for some time. "He was all those three - and someone running away from demons that no one else could see." Neither, as a doctor, did he think he fit the clinical picture of a schizophrenic. "He was thought to be a troll online, but in person he was very shy, kindly and considerate." An internet security engineer who'd been to secondary school with Dawes, and who didn't want to be named for this article, said that Dawes had been "extremely intelligent" as a teenager. It was Dawes who'd piqued his interest in computers and artificial intelligence, he said, even stimulated his interest in going to university. Like a few others I interviewed, he felt guilty for letting the relationship slip.

Others I spoke to believed that Dawes was estranged from his family too. But when I phoned his mother, she was full of praise for her son. "I know my son. He is very smart," she told me, referencing his academic qualifications. She was glad that I called, she said. There'd been little mention of him since his disappearance. "Whatever labels they want to put on him, I just want to bring him home. I miss him so much. He was a kind boy who only wanted to help Syria with medicine." It's why she didn't like to look him up on the net, she told me. "People bring him down [there], cutting him. Why would people do that? They don't even know him. Sometimes I go on the net, they say things that are so bad about him, so mean and ugly. I don't know what kind of a world we're living in right now."

At his smartest and most alert, Kevin Dawes knew that he was approaching a downward spiral - that something was wrong, that it might be inside of him and that it was about to land him in serious trouble. "If I get killed in Syria they'll reference my SA

[Something Awful] history? I mean holy f***," he messaged Eliot Higgins. If he did die, he instructed Higgins the same day, "you make me look f*ing awesome". As he headed towards Antakya and that lonely hotel room, he weighed the options and the magnitude of the risks he was about to take. "The real danger is paranoia," he told himself on Twitter. "This is going to be stupid close."

Hunting Season by James Harkin (Little, Brown, £13.99) is out now.