Raqqa, Syria, the capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, is an isolated place. The terror group’s government has been so oppressive that it has threatened death to city residents who take videos or photos. Western journalists have had little access to the city, the first that the Islamic State (ISIS) conquered.

The smuggled images from Raqqa that the wider world has seen—of lines of children waiting for food, of public crucifixions, of women in black niqabs—are largely thanks to the dangerous and fair-minded work of young Syrian journalists who make up Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS). City of Ghosts, a gripping new documentary hitting theaters now, expertly tells the story of RBSS. We don’t learn all of the members’ identities, but the ones we meet are Syrians in their 20s who became journalists in the fog of war.

“We were willing to risk our faces being seen to get our message out,” said RBSS spokesman Abdalaziz Alhamza, about agreeing to be in the film. Alhamza managed to attend a screening in New York despite the partial reinstitution of the U.S. travel ban on Syrians. In a baseball cap, T-shirt, and jean shorts, he looked like a Brooklynite—not like someone on the run from ISIS assassination orders.

RBSS doesn’t align with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the Islamic State, or militant rebel groups. According to Alhamza, RBSS opposes any group that has committed human rights violations. At night in Raqqa RBSS members surreptitiously put up signs in the streets that read, "No ISIS, No Assad, freedom forever.” The journalists group also reported on the oppression of Christians in Raqqa, calling them “the most vulnerable group in the country.”

The Islamic State, which draws much of its manpower from propaganda about its Islamic paradise, hates RBSS. It has called for the assassination of RBSS members, has succeeded with some assassinations, and has executed relatives of escaped RBSS journalists. City of Ghosts director Matthew Heineman (who also directed the Oscar-nominated and adrenaline-pumping documentary Cartel Land, about the Mexican drug war) spent eight months building a relationship with Alhamza.

City of Ghosts rightly focuses on the journalists’ individual stories and doesn’t cover much political or historical material about the Syrian conflict. Heineman was careful to avoid gratuitous violence in depicting ISIS cruelty, although we see enough to know the evil the Syrians are facing. The R-rated film shows RBSS footage of the first public executions when ISIS conquered Raqqa—but then in future executions, the filmmakers cut away before the audience can see the moment of murder.

Amid American anger toward the media, the film is a reminder of the value of truth-telling journalism. The world simply wouldn’t know about some of the Islamic State’s actions without these young men.

Because the story focuses on the exiled journalists amid their ongoing work, it doesn’t have the foxhole feel of Cartel Land, but it’s still a superb, intimate picture of courageous individuals in the Syrian war. Amid American anger toward the media, the film is a reminder of the value of truth-telling journalism. The world simply wouldn’t know about some of the Islamic State’s actions without these young men.

At the New York screening the audience wanted to talk to Alhamza about American matters, even right after watching a film that focused on Syrians. Alhamza has lived under ISIS and escaped ISIS attempts to capture and kill him, yet a journalist moderator asked him to spend part of the short question time telling an insignificant story about how he almost didn’t meet New Yorker editor David Remnick one time for an interview. (The crowd laughed incredulously at the innocent reason: Alhamza didn’t know what The New Yorker was.) The exchange was almost enough to bury the goodwill the film had generated toward journalism.

One man asked Alhamza if Trump understood anything about Syria. “No!” a woman in the audience yelled in reply. “I wasn’t asking you!” the man barked back.

Alhamza himself was measured and critical of both current and previous U.S. administrations. He has met repeatedly with U.S. State Department officials, meetings he called “useless.” He lambasted former President Barack Obama’s “red line” and the decision to give Russia a veto over U.S. actions in Syria. President Donald Trump, he noted positively, didn’t seek approval from the UN Security Council to bomb the Assad regime.

"If that happened in 2011, 2012, that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Alhamza said. On the other hand, he said the United States in its bombing of Raqqa this year—the battle to wrest the city from ISIS is ongoing—seems to have forgotten that tens of thousands of civilians still live there. U.S. airstrikes, he claimed, have killed more people in Raqqa than ISIS has this year.

The international community needs to focus on defeating the ISIS “idea,” Alhamza concluded. Without education of those living under ISIS ideology, he expects “something worse than ISIS in five to 10 years.”