‘So many people are being killed or fleeing,’ said Daniel. ‘I want to photograph the people who are staying and trying to create a daily life in the midst of war.’

They talked through his trip in detail. Daniel would be travelling to the border town of Azaz, a few miles inside Syria. He would stay there for a couple of days so he could get out quickly if the war came closer.

The situation in Azaz at the time was more peaceful than elsewhere. Rebels from the Free Syrian Army had taken control of the town and the border post after heavy fighting with regime forces in August 2012. This had opened up new paths into Syria for jihadists and journalists. Since then, the rebellion had changed and had become more Islamist; new factions and power struggles had arisen. The Assad regime did bomb Azaz now and then, but Daniel wouldn’t be going directly to the front line.

‘It’s the equivalent of going to Tønder, while the war is being waged in Copenhagen,’ explained Daniel soothingly, referring to a town 200 miles from the capital.

Susanne decided that, for once, she wasn’t going to worry. In addition, Daniel had left a document for her in which all the information about his trip was described in detail. It lay on the kitchen table, written a little messily with a blue ballpoint:

Fly to Gaziantep on Tuesday the 14th, 14:20. Spend the night at a hotel in Kilis. On Wednesday morning I cross the Syrian border at the Kilis border post. Being picked up by Mahmoud (Skype name), the fixer. We drive to Azaz and stay there for three days. On the 18th I’ll be driven back to the border, take a taxi to the airport and fly home to Denmark at 22:50.

The time of the flight from Turkey was crossed out and changed to 19.55.

Arthur’s telephone number was also on the note; they should call him if Daniel didn’t get in touch.

Susanne drove Daniel to Give Station. She had to be at work at Legoland at 11.30 and was wearing her work clothes – red shirt and blue trousers, Lego’s cheerful colours. She waved goodbye from the driver’s seat and didn’t get out of the car to give him her standard warnings and advice like she usually did. Normally, she would stand there at the station sobbing and Daniel would laugh. It was also the first time she didn’t give him a farewell hug.

‘See you in a week’s time,’ said Daniel and jumped on the train to Copenhagen to visit his girlfriend.

He told Signe about the list of numbers his parents had and said that Kjeld was his main contact. He would try to give her updates while he was out there. She told him to take care of himself.

‘I don’t think I can cope with finding a new boyfriend,’ she laughed.

On the morning of Tuesday, 14 May they kissed goodbye and Daniel drove to the college room he had sublet when it had become too complicated to keep sleeping on different friends’ sofas. He vacuumed, so that the person he had sublet from could come home to a clean room.

Then he drove to Copenhagen Airport.

Syria Round Trip

On a curb near the central roundabout in Raqqa three men sat in a row, blindfolded. An ISIS-fighter was looking at them, while speaking into a megaphone from a white police pickup. An armed man stood on the bed of the truck. Masked fighters were walking around the square with black ISIS flags, while civilians gathered in front of a kiosk with Coca-Cola signs to see what was going on. Some people were filming with their mobiles.

Attention was being paid to the three men in the middle, who, according to the speaker, belonged to the Alawite sect, like President Assad. When he finished speaking, the three men were shot in the back of the neck with a pistol, dying instantly. Several shots were fired, making the lifeless bodies on the asphalt jump with each bullet, until the fighters turned their weapons towards the sky and shot at random, shouting ‘Allahu akbar! God is the greatest!’

The footage from the eyewitnesses’ mobile phones was posted online on Wednesday, 15 May 2013 and demonstrated for the first time the methods used by ISIS in Raqqa, where they now had so much power that they could shoot people without trial in the middle of an open square.

That same day, Daniel tried to enter Syria.

When he landed in Gaziantep on the previous evening, he drove towards the border town of Kilis as planned and found a hotel to stay in overnight. The next morning he took a taxi to the border where he had arranged to meet his fixer, Mahmoud.

But the plans for the trip were beginning to fall apart. Mahmoud didn’t answer his phone. Daniel tried to find him at the border crossing among a mass of refugees who were wandering around with blankets, pots and children in their arms. The staff at the Syrian Media Centre at the border post refused to let him go on, unless he could produce a letter confirming he was a photographer.

When he couldn’t find his fixer, Daniel drove back to Kilis and had to wait until late in the day before Mahmoud rang him.

‘I can’t go to Syria with you as agreed, but call my friend Ahmed. He’ll come with a colleague, so you can talk it all through,’ was his rather vague message.

In the meantime, Daniel got the necessary letter from a French photo agency and edited a travel video in his hotel room. The film began above the clouds during the flight to Turkey. He called his video diary ‘Syria Round Trip’ and he sent it home to Signe.

‘My name is Daniel Rye,’ he told the camera. ‘I’m twenty-four years old and right now I’m on a layover in Istanbul eating chips. I’m on my way with my camera to Syria to document the lives of the people who live surrounded by war.’

He had also filmed the drive towards the border. Wearing sunglasses, he said, ‘Now I’m standing at the border crossing between Turkey and Syria, near Kilis. I was very nervous about whether it was at all possible, but now all the pieces have fallen into place. Let’s go.’

But the pieces hadn’t quite fallen into place and he filmed the last scene while lying in bed.

‘Yes, well … now I’m lying here in a hotel room in Kilis. Now we have to see if I can succeed tomorrow. Otherwise, it’s a load of crap. It’s just a load of craaap.’

The round table at the outdoor café wobbled on the uneven asphalt of the terrace. Daniel ordered a cup of thick Turkish coffee and lit a cigarette, while restlessly looking through his sunglasses at the cars that drove past in the narrow street, swirling up the dust. It was Thursday morning, 16 May, and the new fixer, Ahmed, arrived at the café on time, along with a woman named Aya. They presented themselves to Daniel and sat down in the rickety metal chairs.

Ahmed had long, greasy, black hair, spoke energetically about how possible the whole trip was and invited Daniel to his wedding in a few months.

‘I can arrange the trip. I’ve done it many times before, and I’m good at it,’ announced Ahmed, in a way that Daniel thought was a little too cocky.

He preferred Aya, who looked like she was around his own age. She spent most of the time listening with a serious expression on her face. Her eyes were heavily made up with pencilled eyebrows, and a white scarf covered her hair. She was wearing tight, black trousers that followed the soft curves of her hips and a long black cardigan, which hung over them. Her bare feet were tucked into a pair of flat and rather impractical sandals by comparison with Daniel’s leather boots. She said she was a nurse and had lived in Aleppo, but she had fled from the war after she had narrowly escaped being put in a regime prison.

Daniel thought to himself that, as a nurse, she must be good at first aid, and that women were by nature probably a little more careful than men.

‘I can take you to Aleppo,’ she suggested to Daniel and told him that she had been part of the revolution against Assad from the beginning and had gone to Aleppo with journalists several times.