FARDIS, Lebanon — (AP) — Alma Ayman Fakhr al-Din, a lively 11-year-old who loved basketball and learning languages, was playing on a soccer field a week ago in Majdal Shams, a Druze town in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, when the rocket hit.
Running to the site, her father Ayman pleaded with emergency workers for information about his daughter. “Suddenly I went to the corner, I saw such a tiny girl in a bag,” he said. He recognized her shoes, her hand. “I understood that that’s it, nothing is left, she’s gone.” She was among 12 children and teens killed.
The shocking bloodshed unified the Druze across the region in grief – and laid bare the complex identity of the small, insular religious minority, whose members are spread across Israel, the Golan Heights, Lebanon and Syria.
Who are the Druze?
The Druze religious sect began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. Outsiders are …