The war barged into Aleppo city rudely and was an uninvited guest, bringing with it not only death and suffering, but also the dangerous specter of extremist radicalization at the hands of the seasoned fanatics that started pouring into the city almost as soon as its eastern part fell to the rebellion. "There are no atheists in foxholes" and there are certainly none in cities brutally devastated by death and war, the perfect fertile ground for the unscrupulous to poison unsuspecting and helpless populations.

Before the battle of Aleppo in July 2012, I worked with a number of local aid groups that had been providing food and basics to the many displaced who had arrived in Aleppo from other war-ravaged areas in the country. This is when I first met Mahmoud, a gentle and soft-spoken opposition activist in his late 20s. He struck me as being knowledgeable about Islam as well as being moderate and accepting of other faiths.

I recently caught up with Mahmoud, and he recounted how radicalization first started seeping into Aleppan society. Himself a devout Muslim, he explained the allure those ultraradical preachers had. “They filled not only a spiritual gap that was there, but they manipulated the fears of the people. They promised them their fears would soon turn into joy in this world and the next if they followed their word. They glorified 'shahada' [martyrdom] and 'sabr' [patience while suffering] as the holiest and divinest of Islamic virtues, which is completely wrong,” he said.

Mahmoud described to me how one Friday shortly after the rebels took over many of Aleppo’s southern and eastern neighborhoods in the summer of 2012, foreign-looking armed militants joined the congregation in his local mosque in Sha’ar in full combat gear with their rifles. As the imam stood up to give the sermon, one of them rushed forward and took his place on the pulpit and started giving his own fiery sermon, much to everyone’s surprise and shock. He even took his rifle up with him. They had never seen anything like this in their lives, as previously all mosques were tightly regulated by the Syrian regime and sermons were scrutinized and vetted to weed out anything subversive or critical of the status quo.