The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni Read Free Book Online

but refused. ‘I want to be here,’ she said. Her business, however, was suffering; money was a problem and she had an elderly mother she needed to support.
    Ma’loula did look different in the past, she said. ‘There were fifty tour buses a day here when I first came back,’ she said. Her café, which was empty the day I sat with her, was once full. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the next winter.
    The previous year, when there was fighting in Yabroud, a strategically located town near the Lebanese border and just across the mountain, Antonella finally realized her country was at war and people were dying. ‘That depressed me,’ she says. ‘The truth is, even if Ma’loula is quiet now, no one knows where this is going.’
    But she still stoically supported Assad. ‘The rebels have destroyed our country,’ she said. There was no other alternative.
    Her brother Adnan, who had also come back from America, sat down and began to talk about the economy. Because of sanctions and the fact that transit has been halted across borders – trucks couldn’t move because of fighting incertain areas – food costs were skyrocketing. Foreign tourists had stopped coming. People bought only what was necessary. Small businesses, like Antonella’s, were dying.
    â€˜This is the beginning of World War III,’ predicted Adnan. ‘It is starting in Syria, but it will engulf the region. This is a proxy war.’
    I wandered back up the hill to say goodbye to Diab, the imam. I wanted to ask him one more question. Can a town renowned for its tolerance resist the centrifugal pressures of a vicious, sectarian civil war?
    â€˜Everyone is a Christian and everyone is Muslim,’ he answered diplomatically, not really answering the question. He refused to break down the percentage of Muslims. ‘It does not matter,’ he insisted. ‘The situation here will not deteriorate. It’s the opposite. People support each other.’
    â€˜If we become Salafist,’ he said, referring to the fundamentalist strain of Islam that has taken on a new prominence in the Arab Spring, ‘we lose all of this ethnic mix, and that is tragic. Everyone has to be like them. There is no room for anyone else.’
    On 4 September 2013, a Jordanian suicide bomber exploded a truck at a Syrian Army checkpoint at the entrance to Ma’loula. Rebels then attacked the checkpoint – the explosion was assumed to have been a signal – killing eight soldiers and taking control of several sections of the historical town. The Syrian Army led a counter-attack two days later, regaining control of the town, but continuing to battle against jihadists in the surrounding area. But therebels, having received reinforcements, once again took the town, allegedly burning down some churches and harassing the town’s Christian residents. According to some sources, nearly the entire population of this diverse town had fled, leaving only about fifty people inside its limits. The army eventually conquered the rebels and secured Ma’loula on 15 September, and many residents returned, but they still lived in fear of further attack.
    In late November, opposition forces again attacked Ma’loula, this time kidnapping twelve nuns from the monastery in order to ransom the women in exchange for their own prisoners of war. On 14 April 2014, the Syrian Army, with the help of Hezbollah, once more took control of Ma’loula.
    Recalling the events, sixty-two-year-old Adnan Nasrallah said: ‘I saw people wearing al-Nusra headbands who started shooting at crosses.’ One of them ‘put a pistol to the head of my neighbour and forced him to convert to Islam by obliging him to repeat “there is no God but God”. Afterwards they joked, “He’s one of ours now”.’
    In late February 2015, Christians in Ma’loula prayed for their fellow