God is capable of transforming even people with the hardest of hearts, and this is exactly what He did to Bashir Mohammad, a former jihadist who once believed that killing Christians was the right thing to do.
Mohammad, 25, used to fight on the front lines of the Syrian civil war for the Nusra Front, according to The New York Times. Having been born and raised in a Muslim family, it's hard to imagine Mohammad converting to Christianity. When he became a teenager, Mohammad even dabbled in the most extreme interpretations of Islam — "even the ones you haven't heard of."
He said he and his colleagues used to crush their Christian captives with a bulldozer. "They used to tell us these people were the enemies of God," he explained, "and so I looked on these executions positively."
But after experiencing the horrors of war and witnessing "Muslims killing Muslims," Mohammad decided something was not right. "I went to Nusra in search of my God," he said. "But after I saw Muslims killing Muslims, I realized there was something wrong."
The following year, Mohammad and his wife fled from the war. They left for Istanbul with 2.5 million other Syrians. When his wife fell seriously ill, they got in contact with Mohammad's cousin who had converted to Christianity.
His cousin prayed for his wife, and when she got better, Mohammad became curious about Christianity. He asked his cousin to recommend to him a Christian preacher, and he was introduced to Eimand Brim from the evangelical group called the Good Shepherd.
It was a life-changing meeting. Mohammad learned to read the Bible. He said reading it gave him a sense of peace that the Quran never gave him. He felt more welcome in churches compared to mosques, and Christian prayers were far more generous compared to Muslim ones.
But it was only when Mohammad dreamed of Jesus giving him chickpeas that he decided to convert for good. Even his own wife dreamed of Jesus parting the waters from the sea. Mohammad viewed it as a sign of encouragement from Jesus.
"There's a big gap between the god I used to worship and the one I worship now," Mohammad said. "We used to worship in fear. Now everything has changed."
Earlier, a former ISIS member who goes by the name Abu Ibrahim told CBS News that their actions were all rooted in the Sharia law, so they didn't see their brutal actions as wrong. Even their public executions all had purpose.
"There were many hundreds of people there who observed. While seeing someone die is not something anyone would probably want to see, having the actual Sharia established is what many Muslims look forward to," he said.
However, ISIS imposed strict "restrictions," and it is almost impossible for anyone to leave the group. Personally, Ibrahim said being an ISIS member wasn't all it was cracked up to be, so he decided to leave.
"My main reason for leaving was that I felt that I wasn't doing what I had initially come for and that's to help in a humanitarian sense the people of Syria," he shared. "It had become something else."
