CNN
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A mother and her daughter hunch down by the windows of their attic as armed men gather outside the gate. They try not to make a sound. But in the video that they furtively recorded of this fraught moment, it’s clear they can barely control their panicked breathing.
Earlier that day, on March 7, the patriarch of the Khalil family had assured them that they were not in danger. The forces aligned with Syria’s new Islamist government who had descended on their village of al-Sanobar were only going after people affiliated with the recently toppled dictator Bashar al-Assad, he reasoned.
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” his relative recalled him saying as…
