"There were always Christians in Qusayr -- there were around 10,000 before the war," says Leila, the matriarch of the Khouri clan. Currently, 11 members of the clan are sharing two rooms. They include the grandmother, grandfather, three daughters, one husband and five children. "Despite the fact that many of our husbands had jobs in the civil service, we still got along well with the rebels during the first months of the insurgency." The rebels left the Christians alone. The Christians, meanwhile, were keen to preserve their neutrality in the escalating power struggle. But the situation began deteriorating last summer, Leila says, murmuring a bit more before going silent.
"We're too frightened to talk," her daughter Rim explained, before mustering the courage to continue. "Last summer Salafists came to Qusayr, foreigners. They stirred the local rebels against us," she says. Soon, an outright campaign against the Christians in Qusayr took shape. "They sermonized on Fridays in the mosques that it was a sacred duty to drive us away," she says. "We were constantly accused of working for the regime. And Christians had to pay bribes to the jihadists repeatedly in order to avoid getting killed."
This is about Syria of course, but it can be any Muslim-majority country anywhere in the world as soon as the non-Muslim minorities lose protection. Assad, being from a religious minority himself was the only protection the Christians, Alawis and Druze had from the influx of Salafist idiots who pop up like mushrooms as soon as repressive but stable regimes start falling. Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, now Syria are seeing the same pattern as al Queda and others rush to exploit the ensuing power vacuums resultant from the respective regime changes.
Solutions? Bullets and Hellfires again I'm afraid, as there is no reasoning with fanatics. The Americans will grease the skids for the jihadis as they have since Iran in 1979 with lamentably predictable results for anyone who doesn't want to live in a dystopian throwback to the imagined "golden age of Islam" of the 6-7th C; in practical terms "the Stone Age" as mentioned in the linked Spiegel article.
I previously suggested setting up border enclaves for the Christians and Druze, and the Golan Heights would serve this purpose well. If Israel will offer citizenship to any non-Muslims who want to re-settle there, they will have a chance to do-over the South Lebanon buffer zone to protect themselves from Hezbollah and whatever Syria metastasizes to post-Assad. It also would strengthen Israel's de-facto annexation of Golan, and in the zero-sum world of the Middle East that which makes Israel stronger makes worse groups (pretty much everyone in the immediate neighbourhood) weaker.
Of course I don't know anything about Muslims so it's all paranoid right-wing fantasy that they drive out everyone who won't knuckle under to them, right? Sorry Genie, the real world isn't what they teach in school these days (if it ever was, to be fair) and Anglo-Saxon males and/or the USA are not the authors of all the ills of the world.
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