This is a boring photo. But it has a story to tell. 

It was the most bizarre experience I have ever had. I found myself face to face with an ISIS fighter in the middle of a dusty, Iraqi village. Let me explain.

In the spring of 2019, coalition forces were battering the last territorial stronghold of ISIS. Several thousand of their fighters had been forced into a tiny portion of land in Baghouz, Syria. Though ISIS had been losing land for over two years, there was (and still is) thousands of captured civilians that are still unaccounted for. 

The situation in Baghouz was brutal. ISIS was under siege and everyone in the area was close to starvation. Eventually, thousands of fighters surrendered because of malnutrition, lack of ammunition, and disillusionment. 

I was in northern Iraq at the time, and it seemed like every day we heard of another refugee finding out that a long lost sister, or brother, or parent was still alive

And that is how I came to meet “Ahmed” (name changed). We had known Ahmed’s mother for several years. When ISIS invaded Sinjar, the family was forever destroyed. The father was brutally executed, the two sons were taken to be trained as soldiers, and the 9 year old daughter was sold as a sex slave for the jihadists. Only the mother escaped.

One day she showed our team a photo. It was a Facebook post from ISIS, showing a training class being taught by an American who joined the Islamic State. Her two sons were in the picture, posing with their teacher and raising their right hands in the ISIS salute. ISIS would often taunt her by sending photos of her sons doing ISIS activities.

One day in 2018 the two sons had the opportunity to escape. One son fled. Ahmed stayed. He told his mother that he would never leave, that ISIS was his home now. He was totally brainwashed, certain he wanted to keep serving the ISIS caliphate. 

So Ahmed stayed with the jihadist brotherhood. No one really knew if he was dead or alive. That is, until he arrived in our village.

Ahmed returned a shell of himself. He had been in Baghouz, the last stronghold ISIS controlled. By the end, the fighters had so little to eat he was surviving on a few handfuls of raw grain each day.

One day shortly before the coalition crushed the last of the resistance, he walked across the frontline, was taken by Kurdish forces, and unceremoniously dropped off in our village. When we met him, Ahmed had been fighting for ISIS the week before. Now he sat in a refugee house, amongst the people he had been brainwashed to murder. 

Meeting Ahmed is almost impossible to put into words. At 17 years old, he was incredibly thin. Yet there was fire in his eyes, and a firm handshake; his face showed no remorse of where he had just come from. Ahmed was open about sharing what had happened to him. Just a month before, he told us, he had been guarding the house of an important ISIS commander when the house was hit by an air strike. Ahmed was severely wounded; the explosion broke his back and shattered his leg. ISIS quickly took him to a hospital; he was too valuable to the cause to leave him incapacitated. 

Ahmed seemed almost indifferent to what had happened while with ISIS, as if the contradiction of what he had been doing only a week before seemed perfectly compatible with us drinking tea together. 

I had always wondered what it would be like to meet an ISIS soldier. What would it be like? How would they react to an American? Would it be safe?

And yet, when I met Ahmed everything I had envisioned an ISIS fighter to be didn’t fit. Instead of a hardened, hate-filled warrior bent on destroying everything that didn’t fit his ideology, I saw a malnourished, injured, confused teenager. He was just another human being, who had lost his way.

In life, we tend to “demonize” those who have done terrible things. But they are not so different from you and I. If not for a different life path, I could have been Ahmed.

In the end, perhaps they are just a confused teenager who never had anyone to point out a better way. Maybe, if we were more willing to show Jesus’ way of Peace, there would be fewer Ahmed’s in this world. Just maybe, we could cure terrorism by showing the right path to people like Ahmed. 

I wrote about Ahmed and those days of watching the ISIS regime collapse in this article. In this lecture, I share a few more stories from Iraq. My work in that country, more than anything, has taught me about fear, dangerous places, and living above it all.