An ex-Al Qaeda guy took me to meet his mom.

“Here this is a gift.” Mr. ex-AQ’s mother said handing me a headscarf and under-bonnet. “Try it on.”

I pulled them out of their plastic wrapping. Both were embellished with silver sparkles. Mr. ex-AQ watched while I stuffed my neck through the bonnet and tucked away any offending hair. His mother adjusted the scarf over it.

“See you look so much more beautiful now” Mr. ex-AQ exclaimed.

I laughed.

“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose? I mean if a headscarf makes me more beautiful then I should take it off so I’m uglier and not subjecting anyone to more temptation.”

He laughed. I kept it on while I was in his family home. His mother served us some cracked wheat, tomatoes, cucumber, and hummus, apologizing for not having more. Its not like it was her fault, it was hard to find anything.

It’s November 2012 and I’m in Aleppo, the rebel controlled part. I met Mr. ex-AQ, as I called him to myself, at the activist safe house we (my CNN crew and I) were crashing in. A whole medley of characters, all who went by pseudonyms, made their way through. Activists, citizen journalists, fighters and members of the local coordination committees. The regulars who I ended up spending the most time speaking with were a fighter who loved fashion and wanted to be a women’s clothing designer, an activist who blatantly stated that there would need to be a revolution against the revolution given the rise of radical Islamist groups, and Mr. ex-AQ.

That night I went to meet his mother, Mr. ex-AQ pointed to a corner of the couch and said “That’s where Zarqawi sat when he was here recovering from his injuries.”

He was talking about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda in Iraq’s founder. While Zarqawi is believed to have been injured then, most US intelligence points to him being treated in Iraq although there are rumors he crossed into Syria. I had no way of knowing if what he claimed was true.

The name alone sends me back to the first beheadings that we witnessed in Iraq in 2004. And to the kidnapping and killing of British-Iraq-Irish aid worker Margaret Hassan, who had spent decades helping Iraqis. And to the countless bombings that AQI had taken responsibility for that left flesh flung on buildings, limbs strewn across streets, Iraqi’s sobbing in despair over loved ones.

“Do you want to sit on that cushion, I’ll take your picture.” Mr. ex-AQ asked me.

“No thank you.”

If you’re wondering why I even went to his home, its because I believe in trying to understand the “why” that results in a person’s evolution, especially when that evolution is towards violence, and extreme violence. And no, wanting to understand, understanding is not condoning.

Mr. ex-AQ had said he was incensed after seeing repeated videos of of children in Iraq and Afghanistan pulled out from under the rubble of US bombs. He told me he went to Iraq to join al-Qaeda as a fighter, but they rejected him because of his eyesight and clear inability to hold, nevermind fire, a gun. The man wore the thickest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen. So he ended up sticking around there doing admin work. He told the story like a stand up comedian. He also told a hilarious story of falling in love with a woman he saw on a balcony who would wave at him every morning. He could not believe that a woman was expressing interest in him, given he was regularly rejected. When he went to ask the family for her hand in marriage he found out that she was intellectually disabled and waved at everyone from the balcony.

The mind does struggle to reconcile the contradictions. The way that someone who once joined a group like Al Qaeda can simultaneously be someone who also tells you a funny love story and jokes about their appearance. But I also find that those contradictions, those moments that surprise you in an interaction, are what make us human. I also do not believe in dehumanizing even those who at one point would have wanted to see me dead. Do not mistake this for sympathy.

Mr. ex-AQ claimed he did not last all that long with them. He claims he was not aware of just how brutal and horrendous al Qaeda was before he arrived in Iraq. At one point he joked that things would have turned out different for me if we had met there.

“Things are different now, I am different.”

He says when he saw the way AQ terrorized even the Sunni Muslim population it was not all that different to the oppression he was against in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. For him it was about fighting the American occupiers, not oppressing fellow Sunni Muslims. Or so he said.

The other safe house regulars were friendly with Mr. ex-AQ but we were all wary. All sorts of people and fighting groups were coming out of the woodwork. What I called the radicalization of the revolution earlier that year with all its warning signs was materializing very clearly. And that January of 2012 the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria was established by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who you might know as Syria’s current President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

By the time I got there that winter, Nusra had established itself with a number of bases that we steered well clear of. They weren’t patrolling the streets, they weren’t trying to rule. Rumor was that they had learned the lessons of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s brutality and realized that they could not afford to utterly alienate the population. Al-Jolani/Sharaa back then was a mysterious figure, a ghost. We did not know what he looked like.

Watch one of my reports from Nov 2012 on the rise of Islamist groups and families returning to rubble

Families who had fled were returning to utterly decimated neighborhoods. Civilians were regularly killed. The old city of Aleppo was in ruins, its historic streets turned into sniper alleys. Food was in short supply. Volunteers tried to do what they can, but most of the time the little they were able to cook up was not enough. Children fought over remaining burnt clumps of cracked wheat.

People were getting angry at the other rebel groups hoarding the limited bread and flour supplies. At one point, while I was there, Nusra took over bread distribution at the bakeries. This was interesting because it was one of the ways that they ingratiated themselves to the population. Nusra distributed equally.

The other major and more important aspect of Nusra’s presence was that they knew how to fight. They knew military strategy, how to launch a multi-pronged assault, design ambushes and create kill zones. A good chunk of their members, including al-Jolani himself, were jailed in Iraq. Some had been jailed upon their return to Syria only to be later released by Bashar al-Assad in the summer of 2011. Assad was more than happy to let Syrians cross into Iraq and to have Syria be the main transit point for foreign fighters into Iraq. But when the US and the Iraqis regained control over most of the country, Assad did not want to have those battle-hardened men turn on him. That is, until he needed them to make his lie a truth. Remember Assad used to say that the demonstrators in Syria were not peaceful, that they were terrorists. It was a very Machiavellian move.

Nusra’s capabilities were having their impact on the battleground. The resources of the other rebel fighters were rudimentary at best. On our drive to Aleppo we had stopped at a bomb makers house. He incidentally was not trained in Iraq, he had trained in Libya and fought with Palestinian groups against Israel. He had also been jailed twice by the Israelis. He described them as being more merciful than the Assad regime.

He had all his fingers which was reassuring. That his assistant was killed a few years ago when he was, as he said, less experienced was not. He was stirring sugar combined with I don’t know what sort of noxious chemical in the middle of his living room. His kids were running around. There were all sorts of bits and pieces of ordinance he would cobble together and use the sugar concoction and somehow turn it into rockets and grenades. One rebel group took us to see a 2m/6ft massive slingshot they would use to hurl the grenades at Assad’s army.

We heard that rebel units along with the Nusra Front were going to launch an offensive against an Assad military base. We were asked if we wanted to go.

Ever since he took power, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has either been viewed as the former al-Qaeda fighter who has transformed into a statesman or as a terrorist in a suit. This 2-part mini series looks at my time in Aleppo in Nov 2012, 10 months after al-Sharaa, going by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, formed his first group, the Nusra Front, that was Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch.

PART TWO COMING JULY 19