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9/25/13, "Syria crisis: In sacred Maaloula, where they speak the language of Christ, war leads neighbours into betrayal," UK Independent, Robert Fisk
"“We
knew our Muslim neighbours all our lives,” Georgios says. He is a
Catholic. “Yes, we knew the Diab family were quite radical, but we
thought they would never betray us. We ate with them. We are one people.
“A
few of the Diab family had left months ago and we guessed they were
with the Nusra. But their wives and children were still here. We looked
after them. Then, two days before the Nusra attacked, the families
suddenly left the town. We didn’t know why. And then our neighbours led
our enemies in among us.”
It is a terrible story in this
most beautiful of towns, with its 17 churches and holy relics and its
great cliff-side caves. Now the fighters of Jabhat al-Nusra – a rebel
group with links to al-Qa’ida – are surviving in the caves and shooting
down at the Syrian soldiers in Maaloula’s streets with Russian sniper
rifles. You have to run from house to house, and one bullet smashed the
windscreen of a parked car scarcely 10 metres from the balcony on which
Georgios was telling his awful story. Up the road, a mortar round –
apparently fired by Nusrah men – has torn a hole in the dome of a
church. The Syrian army says it has driven the Islamists from Maaloula,
which is technically true; but to leave the town, I had to ride in the
back of a military armoured vehicle. It is not a famous victory for
anyone.
Not one of the 5,000 Christian residents – nor a
single member of the 2,000-strong Muslim community – has returned.
Maaloula is, almost literally, a ghost town. Only Georgios and his
friend Hanna and a few other local Christian men who joined the
“national defence” units to defend their homes, are left. At least 10
Christians were murdered when the Nusra militia began its series of
attacks on Maaloula on 4 September, some of them shot – according to
Hanna – when they refused to convert to Islam, others dispatched with a
knife in the throat. And there is a terrifying historical irony about
their deaths, for they were slaughtered within sight of the Mar Sarkis
monastery, sacred to the memory of a Roman soldier called Sergius who
was executed for his Christian beliefs 2,000 years ago.
Hanna
says that before the war reached Maaloula this month, both Christians
and Muslims agreed that the town must remain a place of peace. “There
was a kind of coexistence between us,” Georgios agrees. “We had
excellent relations. It never occurred to us that Muslim neighbours
would betray us.
We all said ‘please let this town live in peace – we
don’t have to kill each other’. But now there is bad blood. They brought
in the Nusra to throw out the Christians and get rid of us forever.
Some of the Muslims who lived with us are good people but I will never
trust 90 per cent of them again.”...
It
is impossible, amid the bullet-whizzing streets of the town today,
talking to armed Christians whose emotions are incendiary, to gather up
the full – even accurate – story of the Maaloula tragedy. They say that
the church of Mar Taqla has been badly damaged, the altarpiece smashed,
Byzantine pictures destroyed, but even Syrian troops will not approach
the monastery today. When they briefly tried to help some nuns return
after the battle, they told me, Nusra snipers cut them down, many shot
in the legs as they helped the nuns to run away....
The Nusra men seemed to
take a perverse pleasure, not only in destroying Christian icons, but
household beds and chairs, perhaps in a search for cash.
Even
the exact number of deaths cannot be confirmed. But it is impossible to
believe, after these sectarian wounds, that Maaloula can return as it
was, a place of worship for Orthodox and Catholic but also,
intriguingly, for Shia Muslims, many of them Iranians who used to visit
the town to see its monasteries and Christian shrines.
A
Syrian general tried to explain to me later that I was not witnessing a
civil war, merely a “war against terror” – the stock government
quotation – and that Syrians were not sectarian. “In Latakia, we have
200,000 Sunni Muslim refugees living among Christians and Alawites and
there are no problems between them,” he said. This is true. And outside
Maaloula, several civilians claimed that the Nusra forces which invaded
the town – and which numbered 1,800 men, according to the Syrian army –
also killed local Muslims.
For several days, the Nusra
gunmen held out in the wreckage of the Safir Hotel before taking to the
caves. The Christians are now all refugees, some in the Christian Bab
Touma district in the old city of Damascus, others in Lebanon. But some
statistics, however loosely gathered, speak for themselves. Sixty per
cent of the Christians of Syria are now believed to have fled their
country." via Atlas Shrugs
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