The “rebels” then put a gun to the head of a Christian man and forced him to convert to Islam.

Via AFP:

Jihadists who overran Syria’s ancient Christian town of Maalula last week forced at least one person to convert to Islam at gunpoint and executed another one, residents said Tuesday.

“They arrived in our town at dawn on Wednesday and shouted ‘We are from the Al-Nusra Front and have come to make lives miserable for the Crusaders,” an Islamist term for Christians, said a still frightened woman who identified herself as Marie.

She spoke to AFP in Damascus, where she was attending the burial with hundreds of others of three Christians from Maalula killed in last week’s fighting, the long line of mourners led by a brass band playing dirges.

“Maalula is the wound of Christ,” mourners chanted as they marched through the narrow streets of the capital’s ancient Christian quarter, their voices nearly drowned out by the rattle of automatic gunfire in honour of the dead.

There was an irony in that, as the assault on Maalula came only a couple of weeks before a major feast, the Exaltation of the Cross.

Maalula, around 55 kilometres (34 miles) from Damascus, is one of the most renowned Christians towns in Syria, and many of its inhabitants speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

Recalling the events last Wednesday, 62-year-old Adnan Nasrallah said an explosion destroyed an archway just across from his house that leads into the town.

“I saw people wearing Al-Nusra headbands who started shooting at crosses,” said Nasrallah.

One of them “put a pistol to the head of my neighbour and forced him to convert to Islam by obliging him to repeat ‘there is no God but God.'”

“Afterwards they joked, ‘he’s one of ours now.'”