The following is a story written by Erin Cory about her friend Abdul-Rahman Kassig , formerly known as Peter Kassig, who has been held by ISIS since October 2013 and has been recently threatened with death.

Update 17/11/14: I’m sure you’ve all heard the devastating news. Abdul Rahman died at the hands of ISIS. My thoughts go to his family and loved ones. May he rest in peace, and may his courage and kindness inspire us all.

I admit I have been stalling on writing this entry since Joey generously offered it to me last week. By now, we have all read about Abdul-Rahman Kassig, born Peter Kassig, and his plight in Syria at the hands of the so-called Islamic State. I have read perhaps thousands of words by reporters and people like me, who are his friends. But the truth is, the shock of seeing him in this situation, the pain of witnessing his family’s fear and grief, has taken my breath away and with it, the words to make sense of what is happening.

Tonight, for the first time, I feel as though I can muster a few lines about Abdul-Rahman, whom I met when he was still Peter and newly arrived in Beirut. I won’t recount the beautiful, quotable lines he said in his CNN interview in 2012 or in the recently-released letter he wrote to his parents this past summer. I don’t want to try to frame this in terms of politics; as one of his other friends aptly wrote, this is far too personal. What I want to do is tell the story of how we met, and what Abdul-Rahman has meant to me. I’ll keep this brief.

In May 2012, I arrived in Beirut for the first longer stretch of fieldwork towards my PhD. I enrolled in Arabic classes at the Saifi Institute in the Gemmayzeh neighborhood, and was staying at the adjoining hostel. Each day, I woke early to grab coffee and a manouche in the cafe, where I would eat and read the newspaper. On one of these mornings, I was startled from whatever I was reading by the sound of a loud, drawling Midwestern voice over by the bar. A skinny kid with a buzz cut was chatting up the bartender, Ali. He was wearing khaki pants and a threadbare white t-shirt, and his arms were covered in tattoos. I suppose he noticed mine as well – a woman with tattoos still stands out in Beirut – because the next thing I knew, Ali was introducing us. Abdul-Rahman shook my hand and smiled wide, and asked if he could join me for breakfast.

Over the next hour or so, he told me what he was up to in Beirut. He had been an Army ranger, and had come back to the region under different auspices; instead of using his hands to hold a gun, he wanted to use them and his medical training to heal victims of the Syrian crisis. He had left school abruptly, spurred by what he truly believed was his calling, with a basic plan to run medical supplies over the border into Syria. As he was trying to figure out logistics, he had met Ahmed, who lived in Bourj al-Barajneh Palestinian camp. Ahmed had told Abdul-Rahman that his plan was far too dangerous; if he wanted to help, there were plenty of Palestinians in need.

Soon Abdul-Rahman was moving into the camp and working with locals to build a children’s center, install solar panels to give the camp a safe power supply, along with whatever other jobs needed to be done. And I admit that I was skeptical. Academia had bred in me a perhaps not totally unfair wariness about young male expats out to save the world. I had encountered such folks in Beirut before. They were there for an adventure or to pad their CVs, and had chosen the city because it was close enough to the “action” while still feeling vaguely familiar and fairly comfortable. Many of them would leave when the money ran out, a better opportunity came up back home, or the political situation became too intense.

But I soon learned that this was not the case with Abdul-Rahman. If ever there were a soul who walked the walk, it is him.