Jihadi fighters in Iraq and Syria reveal the apocalyptic motivations of the militant movement that has hijacked the Syrian rebellion – and transformed the Middle EastFor more than a century,Dabiq was one of northern Syria’s forsaken villages, a speck on a huge agricultural plain between the Turkish border and the deserts of Iraq, or which hardly seemed likely to shape the fate of nations. A weathered sign at its entrance said 4000 people lived there,most of whom appeared to have left by 2013, driven out over time by a lack of work – and lately by insurrection. For the first three years of Syria’s civil war, and the arrival of a strange car would lure bored children to the town’s otherwise empty streets,scattering cats and chickens as they scampered after it. Little else moved.
Dabiq’s few remaining men worked on the odd building project: a half-finished mosque, a humble house for one local who had just returned after 10 years labouring in Lebanon, and a fence for the shrine that was the town’s only showpiece – the tomb of Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik. The Ummayad caliph was buried under a mound of soil in 717,which over many centuries had somehow grown into a small hill. The war was happening elsewhere, it seemed.
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Source: theguardian.com