The Turks had less appetite to stop people from leaving. The four-hundred-kilometre land border had eighty legal crossing points and many hundreds of illegal ones, making it almost impossible to police. James watched a pregnant woman scream at an entry guard as the coach got filtered into a single lane, with high wire mesh on either side. Signs in Turkish, Arabic and English told people to stay in their vehicles, while further along the awkward face of Syria’s former dictator had been shot out of a Welcome to Syria billboard.

The bus got waved through the Turkish gate. The bearded men on the Syrian side had Kalashnikov assault rifles and tatty camouflage jackets from which Syrian Army insignia had been picked off. The two cars up ahead made no attempt to hide the Turkish lira notes they handed across with their passports.

Expecting the guards to board and inspect, Ryan pulled his green, fake, Turkish passport from his pocket and felt sweat bead on the back of his neck. But the guard gave the driver a friendly smile, then tipped his head respectfully at someone. The journalist? Or perhaps the well-dressed men who’d boarded with the medical supplies?

‘Apparently we’re in the right company,’ Ryan whispered to Tovah, in Arabic.

The coach’s hydraulic door hissed shut. The exhaust threw out another plume and they were inside Islamic State-controlled Syria, heading south on a highway built with oil money. Beyond the traffic queuing to get into Turkey, the countryside was deserted. Advertisements had all been ripped up or blacked out. This was Islamic State territory now, but buildings showed scars from months of fighting and burned-out cars left black trails where they’d been pushed off to the side of the road.

Speeding fines clearly weren’t on the Islamic State priority list. The coach’s plastic trim rattled and squealed as they topped a hundred kilometres per hour. Cars skimmed past, going much faster than that.

A shambolic roadblock caused brief delay, but fifty euros and some banter from the driver did the trick. Shortly after, they left the highway, taking another modern road. A scary interlude came with a tunnel cut through a rock formation. There was no speed enforcement and no electricity to power the lights inside. The coach had to swerve as it rounded a bend and encountered two cars that had crashed head on and been abandoned in the dark.

Over the space of two hours, passengers came and went, the food and medical supplies got unloaded outside of a large hospital and the sun was failing as James pulled out a little GPS unit which calculated that they were now less than five kilometres from the sabotaged well at Tall Tamar.

The driver pulled into a village that had seen some heavy fighting. Modern concrete houses were sprayed with bullet holes and every metal roof had collapsed.