Sectarian killing spree leaves 30 dead in Syria

The opposition accused the president’s minority Alawite regime of trying to stir up trouble among the Sunni majority to blunt the growing enthusiasm for the four-month-old uprising. The protesters have been careful to portray their movement as free of any sectarian overtones.

The killings over the weekend in the central city of Homs “undermine the peaceful nature of the revolution and serve its enemies who want to turn it into a civil war,’’ said Rami Abdul-Rahman, the director of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Homs-based activist Mohammad Saleh said the violence began Saturday after the corpses of three Alawite government supporters were dumped in Homs with their eyes gouged. The men had disappeared two days earlier.

On Sunday, six bodies from various sects were found in the city, apparently attacked in revenge, Saleh said. Progovernment Alawite thugs called shabiha then went on a rampage, another activist said, opening fire in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods of Homs.

The dead included a 27-year-old mother of three, who was shot as she left her home, and a man in his 50s who was struck by a bullet on his balcony, a resident said. “I was at the man’s funeral yesterday, all he did was go out on his balcony,’’ he said, adding that civilians have started setting up roadblocks to protect their neighborhoods. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Up to 40 shops were vandalized or burned, he said.

Sectarian warfare is among the most dire prospects facing Syria. The country is home to more than 1 million refugees from neighboring Iraq, who serve as a clear testament to the dangers of regime fracture in a religiously divided society. They also see the sectarian tensions in Lebanon as a cautionary tale.

“The Assad regime itself has a vested interest to portray the protest movement as one which is violent led by criminals, terrorists, and by external actors,’’ said Anthony Skinner, associate director at Maplecroft, a British-based risk analysis company. “This is potentially an issue that Assad can manipulate to try and divide the momentum that we have seen building up,’’ he said.

The Assad regime has long held together a fragile jigsaw puzzle of Middle Eastern backgrounds, including - Sunnis, Shi’ites, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Druse, Circassians, and Armenians.

Syria’s sectarian tensions have been laid bare for the first time in decades.

Yesterday, the Interior Ministry said it will deal firmly with “terrorist groups’’ and gunmen carrying out terrorist acts.