When armed men entered Hayan’s house last Friday, he thought he was going to be killed like his neighbours before him. Militants dragged him outside, threw him to the ground and started shooting right above his head, making it so he could no longer hear the insults they lobbed at him for being a member of the country’s minority Islamic Alawite sect.
Hayan was lucky – they chose merely to scare not kill him – but by the time the rampage finally ended, 25 residents of the Alawite town of Salhab, northwest Syria, were dead. They included a 90-year-old local religious figure whom militants killed after forcing him to watch them murder his son.
