For more than a century, Dabiq was one of northern Syria’s forsaken villages, a speck on a vast agricultural plain between the Turkish border and the deserts of Iraq. … That was until the jihadists of Islamic State (Isis) arrived in early 2014, an event that the Dabiq elders had feared from the moment the war began. …

One of the earliest sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – a hadith – mentions Dabiq as the location of a fateful showdown between Christians and Muslims which will be a precursor to the apocalypse. According to another prophecy, this confrontation will come after a period of truce between Muslims and Christians, during which Muslims – and only puritanical Sunnis fit the definition – would fight an undefined enemy, which in northern Syria today is deemed to be “Persians”.

“The Hour will not be established until the Romans [Christians] land at Dabiq,” the hadith says. “Then an army from Medina of the best people on the earth at that time will leave for them … So they will fight them. Then one third of [the fighters] will flee; Allah will never forgive them. One third will be killed; they will be the best martyrs with Allah. …

The jihadis started to arrive in the summer of 2012, more than one year into Syria’s war. … One man in Dabiq recalled to me the day that the war for the north was lost to the jihadis. “They came in a column of trucks one day early last year. They said nothing. They just set themselves up at the mosque,” he said in May 2014. “Now everyone knows where Dabiq is. We are why they are destroying the whole region.”

SEE COMPLETE TEXT

  ‘We are why they are destroying the region’: Syrian village doomed by an apocalyptic prophecy