Western Syria
The dry air stank of the dead.
Basilios Nassar knew they would come soon, and when they did, many more would die. Perhaps all those who remained here would die, he thought.
Basilios was clean-shaven, with curly black hair cut tight to his head. He’d put on weight in the last few years, his muscle definition hidden by an extra layer of fat. He was squatting behind one of his Christian town’s hastily erected defences – a makeshift barricade made of burnt-out cars, sand-filled oil drums, charred beams and scorched wooden doors. It was strewn across the main access way, which was in truth little more than a truck-wide dirt track.
On his right stood a skinny old man, the baker, his face hollow and blood-caked. On the left, the young goat herder, dishevelled and trembling. The white sun burned their bare heads, and sweat stains peppered their dusty clothes.
A ground-based barrage of rockets had all but decimated the town. Houses had become burning shells, the heat so intense that it had singed the earth in parts. The mute animals, an assortment of dogs, sheep, chickens and donkeys, lay bloodied and savaged amid the desolate ruins, as if the town had morphed into an open-air slaughterhouse.
He and his fellow survivors had done their best for the dead. They’d wrapped the corpses in white sheets and had placed them in what little shade remained, beneath a blackened wall that abutted the cracked slabs of the small plaza. Hours before, the old women, plagued by flies, had held aloft sacred wooden icons and had wailed for their loss. Now it was 14.25, and the stench from the bloating bodies was overpowering.
Basilios’s brother and father had been badly injured during the airborne assault. Their twisted, pain-racked bodies were slumped against what was left of the outer sandstone wall of the Greek Orthodox church of Antioch, like grotesque effigies. He’d tried to put their suffering out of his mind, and in the past half an hour they’d calmed down a little. When they’d first become wounded, their screams had filled the air and his eyes had filled with tears. But he knew their injuries were fatal. Whether or not he’d join them in Heaven would be left to the will of God. He had some maiming and killing of his own to do.
Syrian Christians had lived in relative peace with their Muslim countrymen for decades. But everyone knew the men they faced were different. Basilios’s people called them Salafists, heavily-armed Sunni fanatics from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan; many other countries, too. There was even talk of red-bearded Chechens.
They’d already destroyed a Christian village to the north of Damascus, less than twenty miles away in Wadi al-Nasara, the so-called “Valley of the Christians”. Basilios’s town, close to the Lebanese border, was next on their list.
It would have been unforgiving odds even if the townsmen had been a trained force. For a bunch of farmers and artisans armed with a few ancient AK-47s, hunting rifles and shotguns, together with a few US hand grenades that Basilios had bought off a Lebanese Christian, making a stand was suicidal. But the women and children, those who could still walk or crawl, were heading for the nearby hills, and the men and older boys had decided to give them the best chance of survival: a little more time.
In the eerie silence, Basilios sensed movement above. He glanced up and saw a flock of cranes flying south, their long necks outstretched. Even the birds are leaving, he thought.
Moments later he felt the goat herder tug at his sleeve before pointing ahead. Basilios peered through the intentional gap in the barricade, seeing the telltale plumes of sand dust in the distance. They are coming, he thought. They are coming now.
He did his best to stop his chest from heaving. The men and teenage boys around him were relying on him to be strong. He was the only professional fighter among them, having spent ten years in the Syrian army before returning home. Fingering his gold cross, given to him by his grandmother when he was a child, he calmed himself as best he could. He knew that if he freaked out, they’d be overrun in a few minutes.
With that, he heard the sound of fast-approaching vehicles. Thirty seconds later the loud cracks from a heavy machine gun sent those around him into a petrified inertia, as if they were desert leverets caught in headlamps.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. “No shooting until I say,” he said, his tone ostensibly controlled. It was all he could do to attempt to quell the rising sense of fear, as palpable now as the dust at his feet.
He brought up his AK-47 to chest level. It had an extra curved magazine, affixed with black masking tape, jutting down a couple of inches from the one wedged into the well. The gas-operated assault rifle could pump out forty rounds a minute in semi mode, and over double that on fully auto. But he reckoned they would be up against at least fifty fighters. He checked the AK’s magazine before jabbing it back into the well, and clipped the gun’s short sling to his webbed belt.
Letting the weapon hang down, he shoved his hand into a cargo pocket. Pulling out an M67 fragmentation grenade, he held the spherical steel to his blistered lips. He willed it to detonate with devastating effect, rather than make a dull phut as much of the cheap ordnance he had used in his army days had done. His thoughts were focussed on killing his enemies; only that.
Hearing the trucks’ roaring engines clearly now, he gritted his teeth and gestured to the others to raise their assortment of weapons. Six ounces of composition B explosives, he thought, capable of causing casualties within a range of fifteen yards. Due to its weight, he could throw it three times that distance, which meant that he might be able to take out at least half of the men in the first truck before they had a chance to disembark. If they managed to evade the blast, he knew it would be over quickly.
He guessed the Salafists were Jabhat al-Nusra Front rebels, or terrorists from the Islamic State group, formerly known as ISIS, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which referred to a desired caliphate from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to southern Turkey. The latter had joined forces with al-Qaeda, although after their rampant brutality, even that organization had disowned them.