Al-Bayda is reportedly a predominantly Sunni Muslim village located in an area inhabited largely by members of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect, a heterodox offshoot of Shia Islam.
"Whether you take a Christian village in the north of Lebanon or a Muslim village in the south, the DNA make-up of its residents is likely to be identical, " says Dr Zalloua.
"It's a very dangerous situation because in some cases the whole village becomes Muslim, " he says.
Two of the attackers were also fatally shot Saturday night, escalating tensions in eastern Sabah state, where Malaysia's biggest security crisis in recent years began after about 200 members of a Philippine Muslim royal clan occupied a village last month to claim the territory as their own.
Nearly 200 members of a Philippine Muslim clan took over an entire Malaysian village to lay claim to a sprawling Borneo state they insist is theirs by royal birthright.
Hundreds gathered at the village last week, shouting anti-Pakistan and anti-Muslim slogans.
The Muslim clan, which calls itself the Royal Army of Sulu, has occupied the village of Lahad Datu since early February.
In village after village, the houses of those suspected either of practising black magic or of killing Muslim clerics the distinction is often unclear have been burned or smashed to pieces.
One of these, al-Destour, a weekly, reported a case where residents of one Delta village captured three hired NDP thugs, videotaped their confessions, then traded them for five Muslim Brothers held by the police.
The daylong siege in a village about 75 miles southeast of the capital underscored the degree to which attacks by majority Buddhists against the Muslim minority in Myanmar, especially those from the Rohingya ethnic group, is reverberating outside Myanmar and especially in Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim-majority country with a history of terrorism by a small number of extremists.
应用推荐