Give a man a part in the final act of history and he will ask nothing else of you. A prophecy has no need to be true in order to move armies. Enough armed men have only to believe it, and they will arrange the world to match the script. Then a quarrel that could have been settled with a map becomes a war that only God may end.
The Village
Dabiq is a farming village in the north of Syria, a few miles from the Turkish border. It has a few thousand inhabitants, some fields, and a small hill. No road of importance passes through it and no army has any reason to want it.
In the summer of 2014 the fighters of the Islamic State took Dabiq and garrisoned it as though it were a capital. They named their chief magazine after it. Every issue opened with the same sentence from the founder of the movement: a spark had been lit in Iraq, and its heat would grow until it burned the armies of the Cross at Dabiq. That November a masked executioner stood on the hill outside the village with the severed head of an American aid worker at his feet and addressed the President of the United States. Here we are, he said, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive.
They wanted the Americans to invade. To understand why, one must know a single report in one of the two most trusted collections of the Prophet's sayings. The Hour will not come, it says, until the Romans land at al-Amaq or at Dabiq. An army of the best people on earth will march out from Medina to meet them. A third will flee and never be forgiven. A third will be killed and be the finest of martyrs. A third will conquer, and go on to take Constantinople.
The men of the Islamic State were trying to hold more than a village. They were trying to stage the end of the world.
6 more minutes: The Story They Believed, The Stone and the Tree, The Girl by the River, Interpretation, The Lesson
Members read every case to the end and watch each film before release. The complete argument is also in the book.