So I hadn't thought of these until reading some of the posts but...do you think Atef was jealous of Mustafa? Did that have anything to do with his goading Mustafa into going to war? Mustafa had it all - he had money, had been given his mother's house, was apparently a good orator. While Mustafa's father had died, it was due to illness. On the other side, Atef's mother struggled to keep things together after his father became a martyr for the cause. Atef even marries Alia, Mustafa's sister, to be part of this family.
I agree we don't know what we would do under torture, and these were relatively young men not trained warriors, but how much did jealousy factor into the decision to go to war and to betray Mustafa?