Sectarian tensions flare in Syria’s Homs after the killing of a Bedouin couple

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) – The killing of a husband and wife from a Bedouin tribe in Syria’s Homs province on Sunday triggered renewed sectarian tensions.

The bodies were found at their home in the town of Zaidal, “with signs that the wife had been burned,” state-run news agency SANA reported, adding that “sectarian slogans were also found at the crime scene.”

“This attack appears to have the goal of fueling sectarian divisions and undermining stability in the region,” Maj. Gen. Murhaf al-Nassan, head of internal security in Homs, said in a statement.

The U.K.-based war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that following the killing, members of the Bani Khaled tribe to which the victims belonged descended on an Alawite-majority neighborhood in Homs and carried out “acts of arson and vandalism” targeting dozens of homes, vehicles and private properties, and opened fire indiscriminately.

The observatory said dozens of people were injured, but there was no official report of casualties. The Supreme Alawite Islamic Council in Syria and the Diaspora said in a statement that at least two people were killed and 10 injured and appealed to the international community to intervene “to stop these attacks and protect civilians in the Alawite neighborhoods of Homs.”

Security forces managed to regain control of the area and imposed an overnight curfew. Syria’s Interior Ministry in a statement urged citizens to “remain calm and allow the investigation (into the killings) to unfold without interference.”

Homs, the country’s third-largest city, has a mixed population of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Alawites and Christians.

Tensions erupted in the city in the weeks after former President Bashar Assad, a member of the Alawite minority, was unseated in an offensive led by Sunni Islamist rebels. But since then the situation in Homs has largely remained calm.

The city was spared from the major outbreak of sectarian violence on Syria’s coast in March. After pro-Assad armed groups ambushed members of the new government’s security forces on the coast, the ensuing clashes escalated into revenge attacks in which hundreds of Alawite civilians were killed.

A trial opened last week of some of the hundreds of suspects linked to the coastal violence.