"The Alkasem brothers, Riyad and Bashar, spend their childhood in Raqqa, the Syrian city that would later become the capital of ISIS. As a teenager in the 1980s, Riyad witnessed the devastating aftermath of the Hama massacre--an atrocity that the Hafez al-Assad regime committed upon its people. To expand his notion of government and justice, Riyad moves to the United States to study law, but his plans are derailed, and he eventually falls in love with a Southern belle. They move to a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, where they raise two sons and where Riyad opens a restaurant--Café Rakka--cooking the food his grandmother used to make. But he finds himself confronted with the darker side of American freedoms: the hardscrabble life of a newly arrived immigrant, enduring bigotry, poverty, and loneliness. Years pass, and at the height of Syria's civil war, fearing for his family's safety halfway across the world, he risks his own life by making a dangerous trip back to Raqqa. Bashar, meanwhile, is in Syria. After his older brother moves to America, Bashar embarks on a brilliant legal career under the same corrupt Assad government that Riyad despises. Reluctant to abandon his comfortable (albeit conflicted) life, he fails to perceive the threat of ISIS until it's nearly too late.