Syria’s war in miniature: meeting the Christians driven out of Qusayr

 Beirut

Ilyas was, he told me, the very last Christian to flee Qusayr. He had been one of just a handful in the town to join the revolution — an odd thing for a Christian to do because the Free Syrian Army (FSA) were and are mostly Sunnis, and the Christians mostly sided with Assad. Still, it didn’t save him. One day he heard banging on the door and saw men with Kalashnikovs standing there. There were familiar faces, some he had known for years. He said: ‘They told me: “You’re a Christian – you’re not welcome here.”’ Qusayr is a grim little town of 30,000-40,000, a few miles into Syria from the Lebanese border. It was once around three-quarters Sunni Muslim, one-quarter Christian, all living peacefully together. It took 18 months from the beginning of the uprising to the knock on Ilyas’s front door, and in that time what was happening in Qusayr mirrored and explained what was going wrong with the revolution across the country. We happened to be in Qusayr on the day, in January last year, that marked the start of the trouble between Sunnis and Christians. ‘Some hothead is kidnapping Christians,’ said the young FSA commander, leaping up after getting a call on his radio. ‘We’ve got to go.’ His men stirred themselves from their positions sitting cross-legged around a kerosene stove and picked up weapons from a corner. We were taken to see a prisoner they viewed as the cause of the crisis. Corporal Joseph Hanna was lying on a mattress in a makeshift cell, a dark red bloodstain showing through heavy bandages on his left thigh. He had been at home on leave from guard duty when FSA rebel fighters burst in, shooting him in the leg. ‘I’m just a corporal in the army,’ he said, weakly.