Syria has got rid of Bashar al-Assad, but not sectarian tensions

Another day, another shootout. On February 26th security forces in Latakia, Syria’s biggest port, killed four people including an army officer from the recently overthrown regime who was supposed to be protected by an amnesty. A day later in Qardaha, the ancestral home of Bashar al-Assad, the deposed president, locals attacked a police station after the authorities set up a checkpoint and shot a protester. That evening fighting broke out in three coastal cities after supporters of the new, Sunni Islamist government rode through neighbourhoods dominated by Mr Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiism, brandishing machetes and al-Qaeda flags. Two days later gun battles erupted in Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus, after government forces tried to dismantle barricades erected by local Druze, another minority sect.