After GCSEs, Rasheed went to college for A-levels - or rather, as his social media showed from the time, A-levels and pulling a few free running moves in the corridors when he could get away with it.

A year later he changed direction. The practical young man who’d built two PCs didn’t want to sit in classrooms all day. He opted instead for an electrical engineering apprenticeship in the city. He talked about how he could one day set up his own business.

Like every teenager, it was a period of great change. Styles came and went. Slick straightened hair and on-trend clothes were followed by tousled wild locks and scruffy urban chic. And he was becoming more aware of religion and politics, and how he wanted to express his views.

The Benyahia family wear their faith lightly and Rasheed grew up seeing traditional Friday prayers, which he attended with his father, as much a social occasion as a religious one.

The change began in 2014. His parents saw a shift in his
approach to the world that they put down to the transition from boy to young man. He drifted away from the local mosque, telling his family that he wanted to hang out with a younger crowd elsewhere. Out of nowhere he asked his mother if she would shorten his trousers - a sign of growing religious observance. She felt he’d look daft but didn’t question him too hard. It was difficult to pinpoint whether it meant anything or not.

“As a convert, I don’t have some particular tradition," says Nicola, a former care services manager. "I’m very Western as are my children because they were brought up here. That’s how we were as a family.

“I kind of knew that something was shifting in him. My husband and I were going through a difficult period - any long marriage will have its ups and downs. But I think this jolted Rasheed and he was trying to find out how he fitted in.”

Nicola saw her son withdrawing from family life, becoming more introverted. He was less prepared to share his feelings - but also more confrontational at times. So she would sit with him and try to talk through what was going on in the family and in his own life.

Nicola, her husband and one of her daughters were silent on the way to the police. This time, they went straight to the headquarters and, within minutes, were face-to-face with officers from the West Midlands Counter-Terrorism Unit

A third of the nation’s counter-terrorism investigations emerge from the West Midlands. It has seen al-Qaeda bomb plotters, a neo-Nazi launch a bombing campaign against mosques and, in the last three years, a long list of young men and women disappearing to Syria to fight, or play a supporting role.

When the Benyahias began pouring out what had happened, the officers had heard it before. They instinctively knew what it meant because Rasheed had followed a pretty standard course.

He had disappeared on a day when he knew he wouldn’t be missed for a few hours, to increase his chances of making it to Turkey without being noticed.

But there was more. He had talked about going to late night Islamic study circles miles from home.

He had also talked about attending a so-called “dawah stall” in the city - men and women who stand in the street handing out literature. It is a form of missionary work seeking converts to Islam.

There are two types of dawah. The first is no different to the kind of public religious zeal displayed by some minority Christian sects. The second, however, has long been linked to extremist politicised groups who use it as part of their them-and-us rhetoric. Anjem Choudary, the radical preacher jailed earlier this year in the UK over support for IS, was a past master at using such stalls to pick off vulnerable, impressionable recruits to his cause.

The family had challenged Rasheed’s desire to attend both the classes and a stall, having no idea who he was involved with, what the people represented or where it would take their son. It didn’t look or feel right and, after some argument, he appeared to accept their counsel.

But he clearly hadn't.

It became ever more clear that during 2014 Rasheed had been wrestling with what to do over Syria. And his struggle to reconcile the competing world views in his head manifested itself in a series of petty arguments that his family had previously dismissed as teenage angst.

But what had made him receptive to the jihadist ideology?

There could have been many factors - but two stood out for Nicola. Firstly, Rasheed may have been targeted during a low emotional ebb, as his parents navigated a path through their marital problems.

He talked about his lifestyle in Raqqa - portraying it as somehow normal. He didn’t talk about the well-reported barbarity of IS. He did talk about airstrikes from its enemies.

When Nicola detected a rasp in his voice, he confessed to having lost his asthma inhaler in the border crossing. She hassled him to sort it out with a doctor.

Rasheed eventually spoke to his father who put the question Nicola didn’t want to ask - when would he be going to fight? Rasheed didn’t know. He was waiting for the call.

His sisters became bolder and started probing Rasheed for answers to his radicalisation - whether there were other young men and women in Birmingham who would follow him.

“You don’t need to know the answers,” Rasheed said. “You’re just going to spoil it for other people.”

Eventually he buckled and named two other men from Birmingham who were, in his words, “of like mind”. While Rasheed's sisters demanded answers, Nicola was struggling to hold herself together every time she spoke to her son.

Koehler warned Nicola there was little he could do to pull back Rasheed as he had taken the final step along the path to extremism. Even if her son had wanted to get out, he probably couldn’t. But Koehler urged her to continue talking to him.

In September 2015, four months after his arrival in Syria, Rasheed announced he was going “offline” again - this time for a month. Everyone assumed he was being sent to fight. When he came back online seven weeks later, he had changed.

Rasheed admitted to his father he had been to visit “Bashar al-Assad” - code for an attack on the Syrian ruler's forces. He’d been in a bunker and, the family guessed, seen death.

When he called on the phone, the conversations were intense.

“One conversation went on for quite some while and I said I was going to put his father on and he said, ‘after I’ve spoken to Baba can you make sure you come back on the phone? Mama please, please come back on the phone’.

“He was clingier to me, he needed that connection to me, it was almost like he needed my voice to be the last that he heard each time we spoke."

He asked his mother if she had been having strange dreams about him. This seemingly bizarre question was loaded with meaning - jihadi folklore is full of tales of premonitions of martyrdom in dreams.

And then he made the strangest of comments to one of his sisters: “If I’m wrong about this choice that I have made, pray to God that I’m guided away from it.”

Was this an opening? Did he want to get out?

Nobody knew but everyone thought Rasheed was having doubts. Nobody knew if his calls were being monitored - so nobody could ask him what he really meant. All Nicola could do was try her best to get the message across that she would move Heaven and Earth to help get him out if the time came.

It’s now a year since Rasheed Benyahia died. The self-proclaimed Islamic State is shrinking under sustained military attack. It may soon implode.

Two things could happen. Experts like Daniel Koehler and other deradicalisers in the UK believe foreign fighters fleeing from IS are likely to be disillusioned. Many will be full of anger and pose a huge security threat to the West as they try to return home. The so-called threat of “blow back” attacks by returning fighters is not a theory. Paris and Brussels show that.

But other recruits may have regrets. They may want a way back to their families and former lives.

This is the huge dilemma facing the West, and there isn’t a single credible security expert anywhere who believes the problem can be solved by simply locking up returning foreign fighters. Prison contains the individual - but not the ideology.

Nicola Benyahia says it is now time for Muslims to speak out. She wants to use her son's death to prevent some other mother’s son doing the same.The jihadist ideology is alive and well and other groups will continue to recruit, even if IS crumbles.

So she’s launching Families for Life, the British arm of the network that German deradicaliser Daniel Koehler has been building. She’s appealing to people across the country who have suffered the way she has to work with her to challenge extremism, in whatever form it is found.

Tell their stories, show young people what extremism does, get those young people to think for themselves.

Rasheed Benyahia was once a laughing, happy young man back-flipping his way around Birmingham. He died a jihadist. By the time he travelled to Syria everyone knew what IS was doing: rape of women, murder of hostages, street executions of Muslims who didn’t agree, and death and carnage on the streets of Europe.

“People have said that to me. And, yes, he made that decision. He went and paid the consequences. If I could have got him back I remember saying to the police he should be punished. He needs to pay for the decision he has made.”

But, at the same time, she says punishment isn’t enough. There needs to be a concerted effort to find the triggers to de-programme people who have been sucked into the death cult of jihadism, she says.

“We call what happened to Rasheed radicalisation, but it is very similar to grooming," says Nicola. "His softer nature and that vulnerability was manipulated on the back off an idea: ‘This is the caliphate and if you don’t do this journey you are not a believer, not a good Muslim’.

“In the last year of his life they [recruiters] ruined him. They lured him into something that he knew little about.”

Nicola has already started her work. When, by chance, she spotted across a Birmingham street one of the young men close to Rasheed whom she long suspected of sharing his views, she didn’t run and hide.

“I went straight up to him. I was right in his face and said: ‘You obviously know about Rasheed. Do not do it to your mum. Do not do it to your family.' He kept looking, nodding."

She knows that street confrontation isn’t going to win a battle for hearts and minds, which is why she is speaking now.

“Unless we start talking to our youth and young people they are going to get those answers elsewhere - the recruiters are waiting.

“My son was a victim and I am going to end up being a victim. I refuse to be a victim to ISIS. We’re going to start talking about this.”