Dawn breaks over the shattered buildings and the rubble. It is the 27th day of Muharram, fourteen hundred and twenty three years after the Migration of the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu 'alayhi wa sallam) to Medina. The place: Palestine.

Mujahideen are occupying defensive positions in a small, battered, refugee camp - less than one square kilometre in size - as they have been for nine days. For nine days they - with only hand held automatic weapons - have kept the powerful Zionist occupation army at bay, inflicting heavy losses. The resistance of the Mujahideen has been heroic: automatic rifles against American supplied tanks, missiles, artillery and helicopter gunships. But now: now the Muslims have run out of ammunition.

The Mujahideen have to throw rocks. One of the Muslim Field Commanders manages to place a call to the Al-Jazeera television station, and calmly, with great dignity, asks Muslims around the world to offer Surah Al-Fatihah as dua for them that Allah (SWT) may have mercy on those killed, now being killed, and about to be killed as the Zionist occupation troops advance, executing any Mujahideen they find.
 

Two days later - with Jenin sealed off from the outside world by the Zionist occupation army - the bodies of the Mujahideen are dumped without the prescribed prayers, ablution or shroud, into mass graves. Hundreds of warriors have died; some martyred where they fell defending their brothers and sisters and the small piece of land where they lived; others brutally murdered by the Zionist occupation army who, despite their military superiority, could only advance when the Mujahideen ran out of ammunition.

For days beforehand the Zionist army had tried to advance, resorting to the cowardly tactic of using captured Mujahideen as human shields: stripping these often badly wounded Muslims to their underwear and forcing them to walk in front of the Zionist tanks.

But the humiliation of the Muslims continued even after the battle ended: wounded Mujahideen humiliated - forced to strip to their underwear - arrested and taken way for brutal interrogation. Whole families held at gunpoint by Zionist soldiers while their few possessions were ransacked, looted or destroyed. The battle scared buildings reduced to rubble by Zionist bulldozers.
 

And yet, the Muslims have won. For nine days and nights a small group of Mujahideen - armed only with hand held automatic weapons - took on the whole might of the American supplied Zionist occupation army. And held them back, resisting the onslaught for three days longer than the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan resisted during the misnamed "Six Day War" over three decades before.

Thus shall the name of Jenin be remembered by we who submit to Allah (SWT) alone: a shinning example of the Virtues of Shahaadah in the Path of Allah (SWT).
 

"The life of the Ummah is connected to the ink of the scholars and the blood of the martyrs. What is more beautiful than to write the history of the Ummah with both the ink of the scholar and his blood, such that the map of Islamic history becomes coloured with two lines: one of them black, and that is what the scholar writes with the ink of his pen; and the second red, and that is what the martyr writes with his blood. And more beautiful than this is when the blood is one and the pen is one, so that the hand of the scholar, which expends the ink and moves the pen, is the same hand that expends his blood and moves the nations. The extent to which the number of martyred scholars increases, is the extent to which nations are delivered from their slumber, rescued from their decline and awoken from their sleep.

So history does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its lofty edifice except with skulls. Honour and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses. Empires, noble persons, states and societies, cannot be established except with examples." ash-Sheikh ash-Shaheed `Abdullah Yoosuf `Azzam

Abdul Aziz