A VICE correspondent spends time embedded with fighters from two al-Qaeda offshoots, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, inside rebel-held northern Syria. What began three years earlier as a largely secular uprising against the Assad government has by this point hardened into a war dominated in the north by these two factions, and the film follows how that shift happened on the ground. The correspondent travels with foreign volunteers and local Syrian recruits who have taken up arms to build what they describe as a new caliphate, filming their training, their weapons, and their movement through contested territory despite the constant risk that journalists in this area are kidnapped rather than interviewed. Fighters explain their motivations directly to camera, and the footage moves between quiet moments in camp and the front lines where they engage government forces. The access itself is the story: few outsiders have filmed this closely inside either group, and the film uses that proximity to show the war from the fighters' own side of the line rather than from a distance.