GAZIANTEP, Turkey — It took the deaths of innocent men, women, and children, right before his eyes, for one extremist fighter to turn against his comrades-in-arms.
The 26-year-old Syrian — who fights under the nom de guerre Abu Omar — was a seasoned soldier in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the militant group now at the center of U.S. airstrikes.
But before the group entered America's crosshairs, it faced an internal war from other rebels in Syria. Those rebels turned on ISIS — which is dominated by foreigners at its top levels, but counts many Syrians among its ranks — early this year, citing its brutality against locals. They accused ISIS of caring more about imposing its extreme brand of Islam on Syrians than fighting the regime.
Abu Omar believed in ISIS, though, seeing it as a force for freedom from the Bashar al-Assad regime, and one that also upheld his conservative religious values. When ISIS began to fight other rebel groups, his commanders told him it was because those rebels were against both Islam and the Syrian revolution. Abu Omar believed them.
Then he took a short vacation in his home village in the province of Idlib one day this spring. While he was relaxing at home, ISIS began to attack the village, which was guarded by a local rebel group that wanted to keep it free from the extremists' control. Rebels and civilians alike were killed in the bloodshed — including children from Abu Omar's own extended family.
Suddenly he believed the worst of the allegations swirling around ISIS — that it was primarily concerned not with overthrowing the regime but with bending those Syrians living in opposition-held territory to its will, whatever the cost.
In a rage, he placed a phone call to his commander. "Innocent people have been killed," he said.
The ISIS commander asked Abu Omar to return to his unit. He also asked what he could do to make up for his family's loss. "There is no solution," Abu Omar said.
He rushed to join the village rebels on the frontlines against ISIS, taking a bullet to the arm in the fight. He and the other fighters were able to keep their village free.
But defecting from ISIS was far from an easy decision, even though he no longer believed in the group. He knew it would make him a prime target for retribution — ISIS reserves a special wrath for those who leave. As another young ISIS defector told NPR recently: "If you turn against ISIS, they will kill you."
While Abu Omar fought ISIS to defend his village, he knew that other men from his hometown, who remained with the group, were participating in the attack.
On the other hand, Abu Omar's former affiliation with ISIS remains a stigma to other Syrians even now. On a recent afternoon, as he ate lunch with a group of Syrian activists in Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border, they ribbed him for his previous ties to the group. There was bite to the humor — as if the men were still suspicious of Abu Omar for his ISIS past.
Yet the scar on Abu Omar's arm attested to his commitment to fighting ISIS — and it's a war, for him, that continues to this day. Abu Omar is now a member of a rebel group that fights ISIS regularly.
Despite U.S.-led efforts to combat ISIS in Syria, it may be people like Abu Omar who determine how much the fight succeeds — those who have decided to leave ISIS, or even turn against it, because of the cold-blooded extremism they've seen with their own eyes.
International recriminations of ISIS did nothing to turn Abu Omar against it — he was wary even of having a U.S. journalist join him for lunch.
But his views were hardened against the group all the same. Asked for his opinion of ISIS now, Abu Omar gave a terse reply: "real terrorism."