On a dusty curb at the Akcakale border post between Turkey and Syria, two men sit waiting to cross back to their hometown of Tal Abyad, which, like many cities in northern Syria, is under the control of the now infamous ISIS.
Many desperate Syrians, impoverished and exhausted after nearly four years of war, are welcoming the new administration.
The first of the two men, a cotton trader named Mohammad, smoked as he waited for the Turkish Gendarme to open the heavy white iron gate to enter Syria, along the road that leads to the ISIS headquarters in Raqqa and passes checkpoints manned by its fighters. To the side, men carefully inspect the results after dressing a woman, who had arrived earlier in jeans and a colorful headscarf, head to toe in the black, full length abaya and face-covering niqab as they prepare to enter Syria.
ISIS now controls about one-third of Syria, to the north and east along the Turkish and Iraqi borders.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based, anti-regime monitoring group, ISIS recruited some 6,300 men in July alone.
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