the townspeople came out to meet him, abandoning their marketplaces and their livelihoods.⦗1⦘ He stayed there for two or three days and then set out again. When the people of Ḥims saw how few men remained with him, they pursued him in hopes of killing him, saying, “A frightened fugitive!”

They overtook him in a valley near Ḥims, but he had posted two companies in ambush. When they closed in on Marwān, he wheeled round and urged them to turn back, yet they refused and insisted on fighting. Battle erupted; the two ambushes rose up behind them, and the men of Ḥims were put to flight.

Marwān then made for Damascus, whose governorship on his behalf was held by his son-in-law al-Walīd ibn Muʿāwiyah ibn Marwān. Leaving him in charge, he continued on toward the Egyptian provinces.

Meanwhile, whenever ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī passed through a town its people would come out to him clad in black, pledge allegiance, and receive his guarantee of safety. When he reached Qinnasrīn his brother ʿAbd al-Ṣamad ibn ʿAlī joined him with four thousand men whom al-Saffāḥ had sent as reinforcements.

ʿAbdallāh marched on to Ḥims, then to Baalbek, and from there approached Damascus by way of al-Mizzah, encamping for two or three days. His brother Ṣāliḥ ibn ʿAlī soon arrived with a further eight thousand men from al-Saffāḥ and pitched camp at Marj ʿAdhrāʾ.

When ʿAbdallāh reached Damascus he encamped at the Eastern Gate; Ṣāliḥ took the Gate of Jābiyah; Abū ʿAwn the Gate of Kaysān at the Small Gate; Ḥumayd ibn Qaḥṭabah the Gate of Thomas; and ʿAbd al-Ṣamad, Yaḥyā ibn Ṣafwān, and al-ʿAbbās ibn Yazīd the Gate of Farādis.

The city was besieged for several days and captured on Wednesday, the tenth of Ramadan that year. Many of its inhabitants were slain, it was handed over to plunder for three hours, and its wall was demolished.

It is said that while Damascus lay under siege its people divided—some favoring the ʿAbbāsids, others the Umayyads—so they fought one another, killed their own governor, and then surrendered the city. The first to scale the wall at the Eastern Gate was a man named ʿAbdallāh al-Ṭāʾī, and at the Small Gate Bassām ibn Ibrāhīm.

Damascus was given up to pillage for three hours; it is reported that nearly fifty thousand people were killed in that short time.

Ibn ʿAsākir records, in his biography of ʿUbayd ibn al-Ḥasan al-Aʿraj⦗2⦘—a descendant of Jaʿfar ibn Abī Ṭālib and commander of five thousand under ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī during the siege—that the blockade lasted five months; others say one hundred days, others a month and a half. The city, he notes, had been strongly fortified by Marwān’s governor, but its people fell into dispute between the Yamānī and Muḍarī factions, and this opened the way for its conquest. They even set up two miḥrābs in every mosque for the two qiblahs, and in the congregational mosque two pulpits, with two imams delivering the Friday sermon side by side.

Such things are truly astonishing, strange in their occurrence, and dreadful in what innovation, passion, and partisanship can produce. We ask Allah for safety and well-being.

Ibn ʿAsākir has expanded on all of this in the entry just cited.⦗3⦘