‘It is neither hunger nor poverty that has driven us from our land (Arabia).  We, the Arabs, are drinkers of blood and we know there is no blood more tasty than that of the Greeks.  That is why we have come to spill and to drink your blood.’  Khalid bin al-Walid, the ‘Sword of Allah’.

Imagine if any Christian had stated the above.  Howls of rage and declarations of ‘dark ages’.  But when a Muslim declares his obsession with drinking Christian blood, that is fine. Christophobia is not only accepted in the ‘modern world’, but positively enforced and enshrined. 

Walid was the Jihadi most responsible for the subjugation of Byzantine-Christian Syria and the Levant from 634 to 637 AD.  The Black flag of Jihad first appears as a standard in his hands, supposedly given to him by the Jihadist supreme leader, Muhammad.  Modern day Muslims venerate Walid, a man who slaughtered, murdered, raped, and whose harem included other Muslim leader’s wives.  He was famous for assassinating his rivals.  His piety was often open to question and interpretation.  He was a thug, a brigand, a mercenary, an immoral and vicious barbarian.  A true Jihadi or Ghazi. 

Byzantine Syria was a profoundly Christian area encompassing Jerusalem, Antioch and other major centres of the Christian faith.  The Byzantine emperor Heraclius had spent a decade on a holy defensive war against the Persians.  In 629 AD Heraclius rejected mad Muhammad’s demands to submit his kingdom to the Meccan Al Lah idol and prostate himself to Muhammad.  Immediately raids started, led by Walid.  At Ajnadayn in Israel the Muslims with Walid in the centre defeated a large 10.000-man Byzantine force.  The Muslims turned toward Damascus defeating another Roman force south of the city in 635 AD allowing them to invest and conquer the city.  Heraclius assembled an international force of Christians and mercenaries and by 636 AD was ready to take the offensive against the Muslim Jihad.

The Christian Byzantines retook Damascus in 636 and proceeded into Israel. In Muslim chronicles the Eastern Romans are often described as ‘the dogs of Christ’.  The Muslim hatred of dogs and animals in general was already embedded in their attitudes and culture.  Far from ‘venerating’ the ‘peoples of the book’, the Muslims hated Christians and sought their complete eradication.  Muhammad’s final testament adjured the conquering of Constantinople and destruction of the Christian empire. There was no ‘brotherly love’ in the Muslim Jihad.  Rape, sex slaves, plunder, money, loot and land were the mainsprings of the Muslim Jihad.  As in Span and elsewhere, the allure of a far superior civilisation and its wealth and trade is what attracted the Muslim Jihad – along with beautiful ‘Greek’ women, often portrayed in Arab Muslim writings as lascivious, promiscuous prostitutes. 

The Eastern-Roman intention was to eject the Muslims from their previous conquests of 634-635.  The Muslims were no longer raiding as in previous years, but were now intent on conquering and settling, with designs on the complete overthrow of Eastern Rome.  The two forces met along the Yarmuk river in Syria.  The Armenian Christian Vahan, the hero of the Persian wars, led the multi-ethnic Christian army of some 30.000.  Walid led the Muslim cavalry with the overall command placed in Abut Ubaida, who possessed a similar force in size to that of the Christians.  Any armour worn by the Arabs had been stripped from dead Romans in previous battles, indicating a gross gap in industry and metallurgy between the two civilisations.

The battle lasted some 6 days in late August 636 AD.  The heavy Christian infantry and cavalry had severely weakened and eviscerated large swathes of the Arab Muslim centre and left by day 5.  However, a sandstorm blew on day 6, allowing the Arabs to charge the blinded Byzantines.  The ‘wind of Al Lah’ blew the sand directly at the Christian army, obstructing them from being able to properly organise and fight.  The heavy infantry of the Romans was useless in such conditions and the calvary retreated and left the field.  The Muslim Arabs surrounded the trapped Christian infantry pushing them towards ridges and ravines which mark the Yarmuk landscape.  They launched a night attack and massacred many of the remaining Byzantine heavy infantry. 

The result of the Muslim victory at Yarmuk was devastating for world history and civilisation.  The highly developed, civilised, and coherent Christian world of the Mediterranean was shattered.  Within a few months of Yarmuk, Antioch fell amid much rapine, plunder and enslavement.  By November 636 the Muslims were at Jerusalem having burned and pulled down any vestiges of Christianity on the way, including churches, monasteries and even hospitals.  Any identification with Christianity marked a building for destruction.  Jerusalem fell in the spring of 637 and Muslims violated the women, children and even the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity’s most revered site, which was now turned into a mosque.  Tens of thousands of Christians were enslaved.  The way to North Africa was wide open.  North Africa was densely populated, wealthy, with high outputs of agriculture and industry, with massive libraries, a school system, sophisticated governance and trade systems.  The Muslim Arabs would destroy all of this over 2 centuries, and North Africa has never recovered a fact little remarked upon by ‘modern scholars’. 

Yarmuk was probably the most important battle in history.  It destroyed Mediterranean unity, trade and cultural continuity which had stretched from France to Persia.  Industry, raw materials, agriculture and cultural exchanges of all varieties would soon be effaced by the Muslim Jihad.  Centres of agriculture, industry, book making and learning destroyed.  After Yarmuk, the Muslim Arabs slaughtered and raped their way across North Africa into Spain and southern France.  North Africa never recovered, and the unity of Christendom was shattered with a rump in the East around Constantinople, Thrace and Slavonia, and the ‘West’ including states north of Pyrennes and Italy.  Civilisation and development was now impaired for over 1000 years as the Muslim Jihad sought to achieve, at the behest of different Muslim empires and entities, the complete eradication of Christianity.