Jakob Sheikh’s childhood friend grew up to fight for Islamic State, while he works as an investigative journalist. Pictured above during a trip to Daret Ezza in Syria, 2014.

Not only had the Danish journalist been in Syria shortly before he was taken, but his childhood friend Amir praised the killing that marked a new watershed for the terror group’s atrocities.

Four years on, Jakob, 28, said he still struggles to believe how their once similar circumstances have become polar opposites.

“The interesting thing was that he would talk about how he enjoyed watching James Foley be beheaded and just shortly before he was taken, I was in Syria at almost the same place,” he said.

“I was like ‘how can you say something like that? It could have been me in that orange jumpsuit.’ And then a few seconds after we would talk about football and ladies and stuff. When we switched subject into topics that dealt with our common history and our friendship he would be very open and just all of a sudden be like: ‘No this is not correct.’”

It’s a paradox at the heart of an intensely personal relationship between the two men who grew up together and now could not be more different.

As an investigative reporter for Danish newspaper Politiken, Jakob has carved a career from interviewing Danish foreign fighters who have fled for Iraq and Syria. Amir was most recently based in Raqqa as a foreign fighter with the Islamic State.

They remain sporadically in touch and last spoke around one month ago. While he can never condone his former friend’s choices, Jakob said he can why Amir pities his conventional life.

“I kind of understand why he thinks his life is better than mine,” he said. “The search for a place where there is a right or wrong to every single question is very important.”

“You and I live in a world where we have lots possibilities. There is no such thing as a correct thing. You can be a doctor or you can be a nurse or whatever.

“Whereas a guy like Amir really needed an answer. Really needed something to be better than something else and he chose the right path according to himself and this is why I guess he looks at me and says ‘I’m so sorry for you that you haven’t chosen the right path.’”

‘BROTHERHOOD’ LOST

The once-close pair grew up in a housing estate in Western Copenhagen and forged a friendship based on their backgrounds. Both have Danish mothers and Pakistani fathers from the city of Rawalpindi and grew up going to the same birthday parties and football club.

But by 13 they started at different schools and began to drift apart. By age 17 things changed for Amir as his parents went through a divorce, he fell out with his brother and he met four salafist jihadis outside a local mosque who had planted the seeds of radicalisation.

By November 2013 Amir followed a friend’s advice and flew to Turkey in the hope of crossing into Syria and joining Jabhat al-Nusra. He bought clothes, a local SIM card and crossed the border before later defecting to the Islamic State.

Jakob wrote of his shock at hearing about his “great, great happiness” after beating President Assad’s forces in a gunfight in a personal story published on Mashable.

“We kicked their bodies and we smeared them with their own blood. They are dogs, you know. Animals that deserve to die,” Amir told him at the time.

People inside Raqqa fear for their lives in the city that is a stronghold of the Islamic State. Picture: AFP/Raqa Media Center.Source:AFP

The close connection to one of the estimated 135 Danish jihadis who have gone to join the Islamic State and other militant groups has been a critical experience for Jakob as leaders grapple with how to stop the flow of foreign fighters and prevent attacks at home.

While high-level solutions such as “integration” and “structural discrimination” are thrown around by experts, Jakob believes Amir’s decisions were the result of personal circumstance that could easily happen to anyone.

“Even though we had the same conditions we were looking at the world with the same eyes he ended up in a completely different space.”

He said the whole appeal of the caliphate is that it can provide a sense of “brotherhood” if that is not available from friends or family.

“In the case of Amir his parents divorced at 17 … he dropped out of school, got into an argument with his older brother. All of this falling out of brotherhoods made him seek another cause, another path in life and that was the point in time at which he grabbed religion.”

“We want to understand why people are travelling abroad to Syria and Iraq? We need to understand it through the lens of the fighters themselves. We ought to ask the jihadis why they go rather than analyse why they go because they would typically come up with a better answer than you or I would do.”

Victoria.craw@news.com.au