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, stirring 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 armed group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led the charge that unseated former President Bashar al-Assad. On the road from Damascus, security teams at the checkpoints waved cars through perfunctorily, but in Homs, they checked IDs and opened the boot of each car to look for weapons.
Armed men blocked the road leading to the square formerly named for al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, where one foot was all that remained of a statue of him that once stood in the centre of the traffic roundabout. The square has been renamed Freedom Square, although some call it “the donkey’s square,” referring to al-Assad.
Protests erupted there on Wednesday among Alawite members – the minority sect to which the al-Assad family belongs – after a video circulated showing an Alawite shrine in Aleppo being vandalised. 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.”
Security forces flooded the area and imposed a curfew to restore order, he said.
Mohammad Ali Hajj Younes, an electrician who has a shop next to the square, said the people who instigated the violence are “the same ‘shabiha’ who used to come into my shop and rob me, and I couldn’t say anything,” using a term referring to al-Assad-supporting militia members.
The protests were part of a larger flare-up of violence on Wednesday. Fighters backing the fallen Assad regime attacked members of the new security forces near the coastal town of Tartous, killing 14 and wounding 10, according to the Interior Ministry in the transitional government.
In response, security forces launched raids “pursuing the remnants of Assad’s militias”, state media reported. The state-run SANA news agency reported late on Thursday that clashes broke out in the village of Balqasa in a rural part of Homs province.