DAQAQA, Syria — Under a silvery canopy of olive trees, men and women crowded around the grave of a 24-year-old lieutenant in the Syrian Army. As a commander handed the dead man’s mother a Syrian flag folded into a neat triangle, the scrape of branches shifting in the wind could be heard over quiet sobs and prayers.
A rifle barrage erupted as the dead man’s friends and relatives fired into the air, sending scores of empty shells clinking to the pebbly ground.
“God give victory to our president, Bashar al-Assad, heal our wounded, set our prisoners free and let our words be one word,” a sheik in a white robe and skullcap intoned. “Don’t think those who die for the sake of God are dead. The martyr is precious for all eternity.”
Killed in an ambush at the other end of the country, the lieutenant — whose family asked that he be called by his nickname, Abu Layth — was the first soldier to fall from this village of 125 people in Syria’s coastal foothills, two years into a war that has only recently come close enough for the sounds of shelling to be heard.