An uneasy calm settles over Syrian city of Homs after outbreak of sectarian violence
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Syria's new security forces checked IDs and searched cars in the central city of Homs on Thursday, a day after protests by members of the Alawite minority erupted in gunfire and stirred fears that the country's fragile peace could break down. A tense calm prevailed after checkpoints were set up throughout the country’s third-largest city, which has a mixed population of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawites and Christians.
The security forces are controlled by the former insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the charge that unseated former President Bashar Assad. On the road from Damascus, security teams at the checkpoints waved cars through perfunctorily, but in Homs they checked IDs and opened the trunk of each car to look for weapons.
Armed men blocked the road leading to the square formerly named for Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, where one foot was all that remained of a statue of him that once stood in the center of the traffic roundabout. The square has been renamed Freedom Square, although some call it “the donkey’s square,” referring to Assad.
Protests erupted there Wednesday among Alawites — the minority sect to which the Assad family belongs — after a video circulated showing an Alawite shrine in Aleppo being vandalized. Government officials later issued a statement saying that the video was old.
Wednesday's protests began peacefully, said Alaa Amran, the newly installed police chief of Homs, but then “some suspicious parties ... related to the former regime opened fire on both security forces and demonstrators, and there were some injuries.”.
