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The most powerful rebel faction in Aleppo city in the summer of 2013 was the Liwa al-Tawhid, an Islamist militia led by Abdulkader al-Saleh, a diminutive former spice importer. He had assumed the nom de guerre of Hajji Marea, Hajji being the title bestowed on Muslims who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Marea being the spit-and-sawdust town north of the city he came from. The urbane and wealthy population of Aleppo had been none too pleased to find Hajji Marea and his brigade of bumpkins entering the city the previous summer and quickly carving it up, with the Tawhid and other rebel brigades controlling the poor, conservative districts to the east and the regime clinging to the wealthy west. There, the residents might have known their president was a tyrant, but many of them preferred to stick with the devil they knew rather than take their chances on the unknown, ragtag rebels.

The Tawhid had built a slick PR operation, which I encountered within minutes of arriving in Aleppo on my first morning as a war reporter. We had driven directly to Ard al-Hamra, one of the chaotic neighbourhoods that made up almost all of eastern Aleppo. A Scud missile fired by Assad’s forces had hit it in the inky hours before sunrise, and the street in front of me – a little parade of honey-coloured houses – had been flattened. Children were running about on top of the rubble looking for salvageable and saleable remnants. The survivors had already been extracted, and so too had the identifiable bits of the dead. Severed body parts and smashed furnishings were all that was left under the dust. It was all so familiar from the news reports I had been watching over the past two years – crumbled houses, crying women, scowling men with guns slung over their shoulders – only now it was here in front of me in full HD. I was so transfixed that it took me a few seconds to realise that the hysterical children across the street were shouting at me, beckoning furiously and pointing at the space above my head. When I looked up, I saw that a huge chunk of stone, the corner of a dainty Juliet balcony, had cracked away from the building above me and was about to topple onto my head. I moved away and gave them a weak smile and a wave of thanks.

Seconds later a lorry with its rear shutters rolled up backed screaming around the corner, and the people who had been milling about crowded around it. Here was the humanitarian face of the Tawhid rebels, who ruled by the gun but wanted the world’s media to show a different face. In front of my camera and that of a young media activist called Farouk, they started throwing out blankets and food packages to the waiting gaggle who surged forward to scrap over the goodies. Over the following months I would watch all the other armed rebel groups do the same, in a series of increasingly odd charity stunts that their media relations officers would then try to sell to foreign journalists and our fixers as worthy international news stories. Al-Qaeda set up a subsidised bus service. Others opened bakeries with money from unnamed Saudi or Kuwaiti donors, handing out bread to the poor but refusing to allow the male volunteers to serve women. Even Isis got in on the act, in the first months after it sprouted like a poisonous weed amid the misery and before it got down to ruling through fear alone. In August 2013 it organised a children’s fun day in Aleppo, where armed men in balaclavas watched over a group of six-year-olds embroiled in an ice cream-eating competition. As the day’s finale, a group of Isis fighters competed in a tug-of-war against a team from Al-Qaeda, treating their enthralled audience to the darkly comic spectacle of overweight and bearded men in thobes and sandals sweating as they grappled with the rope. Isis won – a nice metaphor for what happened a few months later. The two extremist groups – identical sartorially and ideologically – turned their guns on each other.

The fixer I travelled into Aleppo with on that first assignment was a fat and slightly stupid guy called Mohammed who, like many others at that time, was making a wedge of cash off foreign reporters while doing little more than airing the Tawhid’s propaganda. Although Syrian by origin he had a distinct Iraqi accent, and had grown up in Baghdad. His father, a devout man from the conservative northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shugur, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood – a network of pious believers who preferred to live in the shadows until the onset of the Arab Spring beckoned them into the open.

The Brotherhood is feared and loathed by the Middle East’s old authoritarian regimes because it provides a vision for an alternative system of government that appeals directly to the oppressed, using the world’s most powerful religious ideology as its glue. Distrusted but tolerated in the West, the Brotherhood was public enemy number one in the Arab world’s secular regimes, like Mubarak’s Egypt and Ben Ali’s Tunisia. In Syria, it was so hated that schoolchildren had to spew vitriol against it each morning as part of their ritual oath-giving to Assad’s Ba’athist state. In 1980, membership of the organisation was made punishable by death, and the Brothers retaliated with a series of increasingly violent protests and guerrilla attacks. Finally, in February 1982, President Hafez al-Assad sent his army to the city of Hama, epicentre of the Brotherhood’s uprising, where, over twenty-seven days, it besieged and bombarded the entire population. Up to 25,000 people were killed, but with media access restricted and no way for people inside the city to communicate with the outside world, it went virtually unreported. Everyone inside Syria heard about what happened, but their fear of what the regime might still do brought down a self-imposed omertà. Back then there was no independent media operating inside Syria and no internet to help the news leak out. The insurgency was crushed, whole city centres were destroyed. The remaining Brotherhood members were imprisoned or fled, and in Syria no one spoke of it again.

In the aftermath of Hama, many of Syria’s surviving Brotherhood members fell into the arms of a willing patron, the one Middle Eastern strongman who saw that there might be a use for them – Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi president, though also a Sunni Muslim and a sectarian ruler, did not build an alliance with the Syrian Brotherhood out of religious conviction – later he would carry out his own crackdown on the Iraqi wing of the movement. But in the 1970s and early 1980s, Saddam’s main enemy was the Shia goliath Iran, to which Assad’s Syria was allied. By cuddling up to the Syrian Brotherhood, Saddam could undermine Damascus, his neighbour to the west, and in turn also Tehran, his neighbour to the east.

Saddam had funded and trained the Syrian Brotherhood prior to 1982, and then opened his country to those who fled after the group’s revolt against Assad failed. Syrian Brotherhood families were given homes in Baghdad and lavished with generous benefits, just as the rest of Iraq was slipping into a gruelling poverty inflicted on them by their leader’s increasingly erratic behaviour. The war with Iran, which began in 1980, was to drag on for eight years. Two years after it ended, Saddam invaded Kuwait and brought international sanctions hammering down on the heads of his people. By some estimates, half a million Iraqi children died in the 1990s through the direct or indirect impacts of the sanctions, which placed an almost total trade embargo on the country.

My fixer Mohammed recalled that time quite differently. ‘Baghdad was amazing, so many parties,’ he said dreamily. The good times for the Brotherhood families only came to an end in 2003, when the US-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam. Ten years on, Mohammed still sneered in disgust when he thought about the capture, trial and execution of a man who, whatever the errors of the West in toppling him, was one of the most brutal dictators in modern history.

Whenever Mohammed spoke of Saddam, it was with a finality that implied there was no other reasonable point of view. ‘Saddam was a very great man,’ he would say – and there was no way of persuading him how ironic it was that he was now embroiled in an uprising that was, purportedly, all about freedom from another dictator. Quite how or why he and his brother had come back to Syria from Iraq in 2011 would always remain a fuzzy enigma. Looking back, I’m sure that those old family ties were the reason why Mohammed was in Aleppo, a city with which he had few links, and why he was so keen to take me straight to the headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, the Brotherhood’s armed proxy in the city. Three decades had passed since Assad the father had crushed and banished the Syrian Brothers. Now, in the Syrian revolution, they saw their chance to take revenge on the son.

The Tawhid was described by its apologists as a moderate Islamist group, which, in comparison to Al-Qaeda and Isis, it was. But moderate is a relative term. The more time I spent around the Tawhid, the more irritated I became at the strict code of Islamic behaviour they forced on me, a foreign atheist journalist who had come to tell their story. On the streets of Aleppo, a multi-faith city in a multi-faith country, they commanded that I wear the headscarf. They said it was to ‘show respect for the people’. It wasn’t; instead, it was all about respect for the Tawhid. Usually, when I entered ordinary people’s homes in Aleppo, the first thing they did was tell me I could remove the headscarf if I wanted to.

One day in May, as I was waiting inside the Tawhid’s base in a baking hot car with an agonising migraine for an interview that never materialised, and growing gradually more furious at being ordered to wear an uncomfortable symbol of someone else’s faith, I ripped the headscarf from my head. ‘Fuck this,’ I muttered to myself.

I will never forget the looks I got from the surly fighters hanging around the base. Several times I heard them whisper between themselves ‘sahafiya’ – ‘journalist’. To their credit, no one approached me and told me to put the headscarf back on, but I could feel the intense hostility.

Even more troubling was Hajji Marea’s willingness to accept the presence of Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, in Aleppo and to fight alongside them on the front lines against Assad. Nusra’s base was next door to the Tawhid’s, and they had kept their hostages – including foreign journalists and aid workers – in the basement of a building the two shared. James Foley, the American reporter later passed on to Isis and murdered on camera, is believed to have been held in that basement while he was in Nusra’s hands – and while Hajji Marea was receiving the rest of us for interviews in a room just metres away. We never did find out if Hajji Marea knew the extent of what Nusra was doing – he was killed in a regime airstrike in November 2013. Most of the Syrians I knew changed their Facebook profile to a picture of him on news of his death.

In August 2013 I visited the Tawhid’s base for the last time, and found the road outside had been freshly tarmacked and a promenade of elegant white flagpoles erected, leading up to the heavily guarded entrance.

‘We call it the UN,’ laughed Mahmoud, the suave, funny and far more intelligent fixer I had found after firing Mohammed. Mahmoud was no fan of the Tawhid.

I was disgusted at the arrogance too – this tacky show, this waste of desperately needed funds, just metres from water mains burst by artillery and schools and homes obliterated in the fighting.

But in Syria I also saw what happens to the trimmings of a personality cult when it crumbles. Across the rebel-held north in 2013 I came across the same banners depicting Bashar al-Assad that I had seen in that Damascus souk two years earlier, only now with his eyes scratched out and obscenities scrawled across his face. I found what was left of a bust of his father, Hafez, the architect of this terrifying regime, in the lobby of a hydroelectric dam that had been taken over by Jabhat al-Nusra. Somehow, they had managed to almost completely incinerate it. Another statue of Hafez in a nearby town had a leather sandal rammed into its mouth – the ultimate Arab insult.

And when I returned to Aleppo in the spring of 2014, after a bleak winter in which Isis overran the rebels in the east of the city and Assad’s forces started dropping barrels filled with explosives from helicopters, I found the Tawhid had been bombed out of their base. The old eye hospital, already tattered when they occupied it, was now just ruined columns jutting out of rubble. Those flagpoles were a row of twisted stalks, and with Hajji Marea dead his undisciplined mob had forgotten their once-eternal fealty to their leader and had been absorbed by rival factions. It’s what happens to them all, in the end.