The ISIS Hostage

Jejoen’s friends had already gone to Syria. They had been recruited through the network Sharia4Belgium, which regularly contacted Jejoen to persuade him to take part in the war. He had just turned eighteen and had no girlfriend, no job and wasn’t in school, so there was nothing to prevent him from seeking adventure.

At the beginning of the revolution in May and June 2011, President Assad granted amnesty to numerous political prisoners from Sednaya – most of them with a pronounced Islamist profile. The president was aware that the prisoners were likely to join the rebellion once they were released and would Islamicize it. This would benefit the Assad regime by supporting its narrative that the revolutionaries were ‘terrorists’, dangerous to Syria and the region as a whole. The plan worked as intended and the threat from the Islamists became a self-fulfilling prophecy

revealed what an incredible amount of hope he had seen in the war-torn city.

Nothing mattered – which camera you used, how to compose your pictures, how to trim them and edit them.
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s about taking your hearts and personality with you into whatever you’re doing and photographing,’ said Jan.

When he was twenty-one he bought his own camera, packed it in his rucksack and went off with his childhood friend Ebbe on his first trip outside the security of the gymnastics world. It was a journey that turned him upside down in a way that somersaults and back handsprings had never done.