{"id":37491,"date":"2013-09-09T09:06:25","date_gmt":"2013-09-09T13:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=37491"},"modified":"2013-09-09T09:06:25","modified_gmt":"2013-09-09T13:06:25","slug":"battling-for-maaloula","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=37491","title":{"rendered":"Battling for Maaloula"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maaloula is a Syrian city that occupies a strategic spot overlooking Damascus. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it’s one of the last places on Earth where Aramaic is still spoken. Naturally, it’s a largely Christian city. Last week, Syrian rebels moved into the city and immediately began terrorizing the citizenry. From the Huffington Post<\/a>;<\/p>\n

One resident said the rebels \u2013 many of them wearing beards and shouting, “God is great!” \u2013 attacked Christian homes and churches shortly after seizing the village.<\/p>\n

“They shot and killed people. I heard gunshots and then I saw three bodies lying in the middle of a street in the old quarters of the village,” the resident said by telephone. “So many people fled the village for safety.”<\/p>\n

Now, he said, Maaloula “is a ghost town.”<\/p>\n

“Where is President Obama to see what befallen on us?” asked the man, who fled the village on Sunday. He declined to give his name out of fear for his safety.<\/p>\n

Another resident who escaped earlier in the day said Assad’s forces were deployed on the outskirts of the village, while gunmen inside refused to allow anybody in. He said that one of the churches, called Demyanos, had been torched and that gunmen stormed into two other churches and robbed them.<\/p>\n

A third resident reached by phone said he saw militants forcing some Christian residents to convert to Islam.<\/p>\n

“I saw the militants grabbing five villagers Wednesday and threatening them: `Either you convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,'” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Associated Press<\/a> reports that the Syrian Army is encircling the city in preparation to “liberate” it.<\/p>\n

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says fighters from the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra or Nusra Front and the Qalamon Liberation Front still control Maaloula, an ancient village that is home to two of the oldest surviving monasteries in Syria.<\/p>\n

Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Observatory, said troops attacked the hills around Maaloula early Monday under the cover of heavy shelling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The UK’s Independent<\/a> reports that government forces entered the city on Saturday morning but were forced back by the 1500 rebels occupying the city. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maaloula is a Syrian city that occupies a strategic spot overlooking Damascus. It’s also a UNESCO … Battling for Maaloula<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}