One summer day in 2013, the German jihadist Denis Cuspert was holed up in a home controlled by his fellow fighters in the Junud al-Sham militant organization when he was hit by shelling from the Syrian Air Force. He suffered a critical head injury, entered a coma for nearly a week, and was moved from hospital to hospital in search of a specialist to save his life. “My head was open and some parts of my brain were coming out,” he’d say in an interview posted online that fall. “The brothers cared about me a lot. And through the mercy of Allah, I woke up.”

Upon his recovery, Junud al-Sham produced a neat, crisp bit of video starring Cuspert. Posing on a couch in a gray cardigan and a taqiyah skull cap, with a landscape of roughly beautiful hills behind him, he brags that he had grabbed his weapon and had been prepared to fire at the jets flying overhead when the bombs dropped. And with evident glee, he waves off the rumors of his death: “Praised is Allah! According to the media I have been murdered two or three times.”

Cuspert had arrived in Syria earlier that year. Two years before, the Arab Spring — a wave of street protests in the name of civil liberties and democratization — had rattled the region and deposed longstanding autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia. In Syria, it prompted a civil war. On one side stood President Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded the 30-year rule of his father in 2000 and was holding on to power with determined, indiscriminate brutality. On the other was a confounding array of splintered rebel groups devoted to Assad’s ouster.

Some rebel groups would come to be supported by the United States. Others, like Cuspert’s Junud al-Sham, were declared terrorist organizations: perverting the ideology of Islam to homicidal and draconian ends, their stated goal was the creation of a purported caliphate.

Like other similar groups — most notoriously the Islamic State, which Cuspert would eventually join — Junud al-Sham were dedicated propagandists who produced a steady torrent of online content aimed at sweeping up would-be fighters. And to those ends, Denis Cuspert was a valuable asset nearly as soon as he stepped foot in Syria. Because, in his native Germany, Cuspert was already infamous. Just a few years prior, he was best known as the rapper Deso Dogg.

As an MC, Cuspert was an obvious product of ’90s American hip-hop. With heavy chains, coiled rage, and a lean, muscular frame, often paraded shirtless in his music videos, he was clearly pinching a bit of Tupac (he named one album Alle Augen Auf Mich, a German translation of Pac’s All Eyez on Me) and a bit of Mobb Deep. But a few years before arriving in Syria, he’d left hip-hop behind.

In Germany, he had helped create an organization dedicated to jihadist propaganda named Millatu Ibrahim, or Community of Abraham. In mosque sermons and media appearances, he spoke grandly of the plight of the Palestinians, the drone attacks in Pakistan, and the sins of American imperialism. He presented himself as a reformed infidel (“Deso” even was short for “devil’s son”) who’d embraced the light.

Though he left rap, Cuspert never abandoned music. He began instead singing songs in praise of the international jihad, what jihadists refer to as nasheeds. Traditionally, nasheeds are songs of uplift, mostly a cappella, about Islam, its practices, and its history. But these were songs about fighters-in-arms, about explosions, about mass murder. In one, a German-language adaptation of a jihadist anthem called “Qariban Qariba,” Cuspert declared, Enemies of Allah, we want your blood/ It tastes so wonderful.

After leaving Germany, he reimagined himself with a new name. He was now Abu Talha al-Almani — Abu Talha the German. Thanks to Junud al-Sham and Islamic State videos, he became possibly the most prominent black man within jihadist ranks in Iraq and Syria. He was an ex-gangster rapper on the front lines, cheating death, singing songs of war. In videos, he was seen marching through the bloodied and at times decapitated victims of his fellow fighters; his job was to praise the massacring, and he took to it with fervor.

“It comes as no surprise that even Abu Talha being rushed to the hospital after the air attack was captured on camera,” noted the Middle East Media Research Institute in a report after the incident in the summer of 2013. “Few jihadi alive today are as photographed or video-recorded as Cuspert.” In an email in June of this year, Isabelle Kalbitzer, a spokesperson for Berlin’s intelligence service Verfassungsschutz, wrote, “he was something like a pop star of jihad.”

In October of 2015, two years after his coma-inducing incident, Cuspert was again reported to have been shelled. According to the Pentagon at the time, he was traveling in a pick-up truck on a road out of Raqqa when he was hit in a U.S. airstrike and killed.

During the months that followed, ISIS continued to release videos featuring Cuspert. In them, he never explicitly refers to the October airstrike; the simple presumption was that the videos were made before his death. In recent months, however, online chatter — from institutions, academics, and semi-amateur online jihadist watchers alike — suggested that things weren’t as clear as they seemed. Verfassungsschutz, the Berlin intelligence service, went as far as to announce that they could not conclusively say Cuspert was dead. This echoed what was being spread by German-speaking ISIS supporters through social media: that Cuspert was alive.

Then, in July of 2016, the Pentagon refuted their previous claims as to Cuspert’s death. While withholding their actual intelligence as classified, a spokesperson, Marine Major Adrian J.T. Rankine-Galloway, released the following statement to The FADER:

“In Oct 2015, the Coalition” — the network of nations jointly fighting ISIS — “conducted an airstrike against operative Denis Cuspert, aka Deso Dogg and Abu Talha al-Almani. Because we are talking about intelligence, I really can’t speak in great detail about this. However I can tell you that, at the time of the strike, our assessment was one of a successful strike against Denis Cuspert. Since that assessment, there has been new information. It now appears that assessment was incorrect and Denis Cuspert survived.”