Guardian reporter meets face-to-face with feared senior leader of ISIS
The meetings happened in secret locations close to the Syrian border. The journalists' cell phones were taken, the batteries removed. A false step could mean getting killed. Over the course of months, reporter Martin Chulov sat down repeatedly with Abu Ahmed, a senior leader of the feared militant group ISIS.
Little is known about the inner workings of the leadership of ISIS, or about how the group rose from obscurity to fan out across Syria and Iraq, declaring an Islamic caliphate this summer and spreading an ideology of fear.
But when Abu Ahmed finally agreed to speak with Chulov, it was clear that he was different than many members of the hard-line fanatical organization. "It was very clear to me that he was not the ideologue that I anticipated he might have been," Chulov told As it Happens' guest host Helen Mann.
"He was a man who feared very much for the future of himself and his family. He felt as though he had no choice but to continue with ISIS because without that, he would be imperilled forever more."
Abu Ahmed was drawn into the inner circle of what would later become the ISIS leadership when he was imprisoned in 2004 by the US in Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. It was there that he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, now the feared leader of ISIS and self-declared caliph.
Abu Ahmed offered rare insights into al-Baghdadi: that he is methodical, devout, and appears to wholeheartedly endorse the grizzly beheading of other Muslims used by his soldiers in Syria.
But Abu Ahmed also revealed that not everyone within ISIS still supports the group's increasingly radical leanings or brutal tactics. It wasn't what they stet out to be when the group first came together in 2004.