This is a BBC podcast.

You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBCWorld Service.com slash podcasts.

Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service. I'm Chloe Hadjimuthieu.

This is a story about four friends who took on the so-called Islamic State,

young men barely out of their teens who had no real idea what

challenging the world's most powerful jihadists would mean. Three years later they're in hiding. So many of their friends and family are dead and

they've changed beyond recognition. Today there is Islamic State's wanted. Before Syria fell apart, they were pretty ordinary guys.

We were living a normal life, so we were playing football, hanging with the friends, drinking, as any teenagers in this world are doing.

This is Abdul Aziz. His friends call him Aziz. A gangly gangly 24 year old he wears a baseball cap and tight black jeans that hang low on his backside.

I had big dreams. That's Hissam. He often winks and smiles at you in a way that makes you feel like you've known him for years.

Before the revolution, I was studying petroleum engineering.

I was 100% committed to my studies.

I didn't know anything other than my studies.

Sarmad, he's the youngest. he's also the biggest, with a quick smile and a mischievous sense of humour, and then there's Hamud.

I used to call him crazy guy, because all the time I heard a Hamud got arrested he was like a cat

with a lot of lives. Hamud's a complex mix part computer geek part fearless

rebel wanting to take on authority wherever he finds it.

You'll hear a lot about him in this story but you won't hear Hamud himself and

there's a good reason for that. These young men are all hunted. ISIS wants them dead.

Hamud most of all. Why? Because for years to counter Islamic State's own online

propaganda which has been so effective in recruiting jihadis, Hamud and his friends have

been smuggling an alternative portrait of life under ISIS to the wider world.

...