Bedouin gunmen have set fire to Alawite homes in the Syrian city of Homs in revenge for the killing of a tribal couple, residents have said, in the latest bout of sectarian violence in Syria.
Cars were also set on fire in Al Muhajireen, a mixed district in the east of the city, near where a husband and wife from the Bani Khaled tribe were murdered on Saturday. The scale of the violence is not yet known, as the government sent forces to the city to restore order, and imposed a curfew.
“Security personnel have been deployed in Alawite areas but the situation in Homs remains very sensitive,” said a resident who works as a graphic designer and gave her name as Rawa. State television announced that a curfew has been imposed from 5pm to 5am across Homs. Claims on social media that two Alawite civilians were killed could not be confirmed.
The violence is the latest setback to Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), the former Al Qaeda affiliate seeking a transformation from militant group to leader of a government pivotal to regional stability and the restoration of US influence in the Middle East. HTS took power after ousting the regime of Bashar Al Assad. Several episodes of mass killings against Alawites and Druze communities in provincial Syria have occurred since.
Syria's Interior Ministry said that security forces have “deployed heavily” in parts of Homs to maintain stability after the murder of the couple at their home by unknown assailants. The killing “aimed at spreading sectarian strife”, the ministry said, citing “sectarian slogans” at the scene of the crime.
Homs is home to Syria's main oil refinery and lies on a motorway leading from the capital Damascus to the Mediterranean coast. It was overwhelmingly Sunni before Hafez Al Assad, the father of Bashar, took power in 1970.
He offered positions in the bureaucracy and state-owned enterprises disproportionately to Alawites, attracting members of the sect to Homs and other urban centres. Waves of Bedouin migration from the Badia region east of Homs to the city also took place in the last century.
Another resident, who declined to be named, said that “no one knows” why the couple were killed and pointed out that inflaming tension in the city is “easy” given the communal conflicts over property and business in Homs that preceded the civil war. The city is also situated near main smuggling routes to Lebanon.
Ethnic and religious minorities comprise about a quarter of the population in the Sunni-majority country, their members wary of the prospect of Islamist rule being imposed under the new HTS order. The new authorities have embarked on a five-year transition towards pluralism, although officials have avoided naming democracy as the end result. President Ahmad Al Shara has rejected demands from members of some minorities, particularly the Druze and the Kurds, for a decentralised state.
Last week, trials began for 14 of several hundred men accused of killings or other wrongdoing during a state campaign in March to quell opposition among coastal Alawite communities in western Syria. At least 1,300 Alawite civilians were killed in the March offensive, while dozens of government troops also died, mostly in ambushes by remnants of security forces from the old order.
Killings and forced disappearances have continued since March, albeit at a lower pace, against members of the sect on the coast, as well as in Homs and other areas in central and western Syria. An official Syrian committee, though, found that all but one of 42 cases of alleged abductions of Alawite women were false.
Foreign governments have said the extent of diplomatic relations and sanctions relief for Syria will depend partly on the new government's ability to protect minorities and unite the country.
