You are a UK-born fighter from a Pakistani family. Your native language is English, but you grew up speaking Pashtun around the house. Your Arabic is quite poor. You are the most tech-savvy of the team, having built and run your own pro-jihad websites and YouTube channels. But conflicts with your parents were too much to handle. Their version of Islam is too soft and feckless to ever save the Islamic people from imperialist Crusaders and Jews. You dropped out of college and retreated online, where you were further radicalized.
Through instant messages, social media posts, and email, you met Amena, a jihadi widow looking for a husband. She encouraged you to come to Syria and join the fight against its Alawite Shia-dominated dictatorship. You were assigned to Al-Hisbah and then Dabiq, ISIL’s online recruitment magazine.

When you first came to ISIL, your fellow fighters told you of Amena’s martyrdom by U.S. bombs. It has occurred to you that she may never have existed at all. Rather than try to go home, you stayed and contributed to Dabiq. But even that proved a disappointment. You are clearly the brains of the operation, but your editor picked Gökhan Kırdar to be in front of the camera. That guy is an empty-headed poser. He wants to make jihadi music videos, for fuck’s sake! How is the world supposed to take the Caliphate seriously when we’re leading with a down-under Vanilla Ice?
You share your opinions with no one but Qazim Ademi. He seems to share a sense of doubt concerning some of the things the two of you have seen since arriving.
You have been working with Gökhan and Qazim for about three months.

You run the camera and are jealous that Gökhan gets to be in front of it.

You are an ISIL foreign fighter, short on combat skills but long on being foreign. You have only recently arrived in ISIL. Your first duties were with Al-Hisbah, the religious police. You handed out fines for violations of ISIL’s massive list of proscribed acts, from smoking to inadequate beard length to allowing female family members out without escorts. You had to administer beatings to repeat offenders. Worse offenses were given the death penalty. That wasn’t on you, of course, but more experienced fighters.

You know enough to be wary of everyone around you. Anonymous denouncements can easily lead to imprisonment, torture, and execution without ever knowing the charge or your accusers.