The murders, gang-rapes, and desecration of churches continues, but now we have accounts that previously non-combatant Sunni Muslims have turned on their long-time neighbors and have guided the thugs into the town:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-crisis-in-sacred-maaloula-where-they-speak-the-language-of-christ-war-leads-neighbours-into-betrayal-883961
"The Diab family can never return to Maaloula. Not since the Christians of this beautiful and sacred town saw their Muslim neighbours leading the armed Nusrah Islamists to their homes. Georgios remembers how he peered over his balcony and saw Mohamed Diab and Ossama Diab and Yasser Diab and Hossam Diab and Khaled Turkik Qutaiman – all from Maaloula – walking in the street with men whom he said were dressed in Afghan-Pakistani clothes. “One of them had a Kalashnikov rifle in one hand and a sword in the other,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief.
Twenty years ago, identical tragedies destroyed the villages of Bosnia. Now they are being re-enacted in Syria. “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.”......
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. .........
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......
The problem, of course, is that there’s a simple military solution to Maaloula’s present agony: for the army to use shellfire from their Russian-made tanks to blow the caves to pieces. But that would only continue the destruction of the heritage of Maaloula, whose people still speak Aramaic, the language which scholars believe was spoken by Christ. Only five months ago, in an untouched Maaloula, I stood next to the church of Mar Taqla while a Catholic girl recited the Lord’s Prayer’s in Aramaic. No prayers now.
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.
Almost every soldier I met had been wounded. Lt Talal, who comes from Sweida, had been hit in both legs during the battles. Two Syrian soldiers were hit on Monday, one in the legs, another in the shoulder. From an earlier skirmish with Nusra men – apparently with another Diab brother – Georgios had been shot in the arm, legs and ribs, and one of his fingers had been torn off by a bullet.
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......'
Here is a story that will not, save a pathetically few exceptions, be reported by the Western media Al-Nusra not only slaughtering non-Sunnis - Christians, Alawites, and fellow Muslim Shiites, but being led into town by its residents. Another facet of this story that will not be told - Syrian Army soldiers risking their lives to help non-Muslim of all types escape the slaughter and refraining from the most effective means of destroying the Al-Nusra thugs that are dug in in that area -they will not rain down artillery on the Al-Nusra positions because they want to avoid doing any more damage to the city.
I am reminded the the US Marines during failed NVA Tet offensive in Vietnam. The city of Hue was initially taken by the North Vietnamese, but the Marines were given orders to engage in urban combat., or house-to-house fighting, to avoid unnecessary damage to the numerous religious buildings in Hue. Neither the Marines nor the United States were given any credit for this move that risked lives to respect the faith of others, and I have no doubt that the world will be told nothing about the actions of the Syrian army.
Assuming for the moment that the bulk of the Suuni Muslims residents of Maaloula did not have any intense hatred of their neighbors - whose families go back with their own for of multiple generations and probably did not all wake up one day deciding that they wanted all non-Sunnis out, I have simple explanation for their actions:
Islam is Fear.
The Sunni Muslims knew that they had a choice; to act in defense of their neighbors in the spirit of humanity or save themselves. The chose the latter. I have little doubt that word was sent to the Sunnis of Maaloula - "Help us, or when we enter your town, we will consider you to be non-Sunnis".
It is the same fear that causes virtually every Muslim family to turn out for the next call for a mob. Danish cartoons, a Pope (Benedict XVI) simply noting that Islam was spread almost solely by war and conquest, wild claim that a Coptic women is being prevented by her family from concerting to Islam, that the Coptic Patriarch is trying to place Muslims under Christian rule, or any other reason to call for violence - "show up and act was we do or you will be next." ..."If you stay home we will assume that you are one of them."
This series of three posts says it more clearly and thoroughly than I ever could:
I could only find Part III of this series on the following link:
There were more reports of carnage in Maaloula. It appears that the city was by no means a military target.
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