(Reuters) - When he was agitating for revolution, urging fellow Syrians to rise up against President Bashar al-Assad, Abdullah dreaded the midnight knock at the door from the secret police.
Now that the uprising has succeeded in his home town near Aleppo, pro-democracy activists are living in fear again - and this time those who brand them "traitor" don't bother to knock.
Two years ago, after Abdullah broke off his studies to run social media campaigns against Assad, he was held and tortured by security men. This summer, it happened again - only now it was Islamist gunmen loyal to al Qaeda who smashed into his family's house, broke everything in their way and took him off to a cell where, once more, he was blindfolded and beaten.
"The sad thing is that those who were doing this were not Assad's police," Abdullah told Reuters from Turkey, where he managed to flee after his latest ordeal. "They were fighters who were supposed to be fighting for freedom, our freedom.
"Back then they called me 'traitor' for demanding freedom. These armed men also tortured me for calling for freedom."
His story is increasingly familiar across northern Syria, where Assad's government has ceded territory to a bewildering array of rival militias. The rising power is militant Islam and men who see democracy as the work of the devil, or the West, a system contrary to their hopes for a state ruled by religion.