For years Abood Hamam chronicled the war in Syria for news outlets all over the world without ever revealing his name - and despite being employed by different warring parties. He began as photographer to the presidential couple - Bashar and Asma al-Assad. Later he filmed Islamic State's victory parade. Now, finally, he's broken cover, to encourage exiles to return to his beloved hometown, Raqqa. Abood Hamam laughs when asked - as a professional studier of faces - to describe himself. His looks and his personality, he says, have been shaped by the war in his country that's already lasted nine years. "Whenever I look in the mirror, I'm astonished by how much white hair I have now," he says. "And it's all because of the war and the stress I've been living through." Abood is only 45. But he lives his life on a tightrope, in constant fear, risking everything to bring the truth of what's happening in Syria to the world. He's probably the only photojournalist to have worked under every major force in the conflict - the Assad dictatorship, the opposition Free Syrian Army, the rival Islamist groups Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, and the Kurdish-controlled SDF. "A picture can kill you, just as a picture can save your life," he says. He feared his secretly taken photos of rebel attacks in Damascus, early in the uprising, would get him killed by the secret police, the Mukhabarat, if they found out what he was doing. At that stage the regime was keen to hide the rebels' growing military strength. And later, his camera skills may have helped keep him alive when the Islamic State (IS) needed him to record the military parade celebrating their takeover of his home city, Raqqa. Abood's remarkable story begins amid the rolling fields around Raqqa - the subject of many of his pictures - where his father was a farmer. "To be honest, the society I grew up in, and also my parents, they didn't really appreciate journalism or photographers. They would have preferred me to be a teacher or a lawyer," he says. "They thought photographers, it's just a silly job." But Abood became hooked when his elder brother gave him his first camera, a Russian-made Zenit. He graduated from the School of Photography in Damascus, and ended up, before the uprising of 2011, as head of photography at the state news agency, Sana, a propaganda arm of the government. Part of his job was to record the official comings and goings of President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma. Despite the image she cultivated as a down-to-earth First Lady, eager to talk and listen to ordinary people, Abood says she and her husband never spoke to him in all the time he hovered around them with his camera. "On official missions we photographers were always accompanied by senior army and intelligence officers," he says. "I hated it, because you had to deal with them in a certain [respectful] way, and that's just not my character." When the mass street protests of 2011 turned into armed insurrection, Abood began to live a terrifying double life. By day he helped polish the regime's image with his official photos. By night and at dawn, he secretly recorded the opposition Free Syrian Army's attacks in the capital. He sent his pictures to international news agencies using a pseudonym, Nur Furat. Furat is the Arabic name for the River Euphrates which flows through Raqqa, where Abood likes to relax when he gets the chance - he calls the river his "therapist". Up till today, he says, the outlets that published his pictures don't know his real name. But soon, it became too dangerous to continue. "The memory stick that I sneaked in my pocket after covering these events that I wasn't allowed to cover, I always thought of as a bullet that would kill me if I was discovered," he says. In 2013, after Raqqa became the first provincial capital in Syria to fall to the rebels, Abood escaped from Damascus and returned home. He had defected. But life as a photojournalist there was no less risky. He feared the many rebel forces jostling for control of the city would suspect him of being a regime infiltrator. Then, in mid-2014, his position became more precarious still. "I saw cars and motorcycles roaming the streets with black flags. Someone approached me and said, 'This is the new Islamic caliphate.' And I didn't know what that meant. What was this caliphate?" When IS took over, most journalists fled. Abood, a former servant of the Assads, should have been in more danger than most. But he stayed - and went on working. Extraordinary footage discovered later in the mobile phone of a dead IS fighter shows him in a long beige galabiya gown filming at a road junction - the snapper snapped.