On the road from Damascus, security teams at the checkpoints waved cars through perfunctorily but in Homs they checked IDs and opened the trunk of each car to look for weapons.

Armed men blocked the road leading to the square formerly named for Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, where one foot was all that remained of a statue of him that once stood in the centre of the traffic roundabout.

Protests erupted there on Wednesday among Alawites — the minority sect to which the 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.

The protests were part of a larger flare-up of violence on Wednesday. Pro-Assad militants 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 Thursday that clashes broke out in the village of Balqasa in a rural part of Homs province.

The unrest left many people fearful that the relatively peaceful conditions that have prevailed since Assad's fall could break down into sectarian fighting as the country begins to recover following nearly 14 years of civil war.

Those who instigated the violence "are supported by parties that may be external that want strife for Syria to return it to square one, the square of sectarianism,” Amran said.

In the predominantly Christian Homs suburb of Fayrouzeh, a group of teenage girls took each other’s pictures next to a giant cutout of Santa Claus with a Christmas tree in the town square.

Residents of the area said their initial fears that the country's new rulers would target religious minorities were quickly laid to rest. HTS was once aligned with al-Qaeda, but its leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, has cut ties with the group and since coming to power has preached religious coexistence.

“We had a very beautiful holiday even though there was some anxiety before it,” said Fayrouzeh resident Sarab Kashi. “The guys from HTS volunteered and stood as guards on the door of the churches.”

The city’s Sunni majority, meanwhile, welcomed the new administration. Many of the young men now guarding its streets were originally from Homs and were evacuated to opposition-held Idlib when Assad’s forces solidified control of their areas years ago.

The country’s new rulers have scrambled to impose order after the initial anarchic days after Assad’s fall.

The former police and security forces — widely known for corruption — were disbanded, and members of the police force in what was formerly a regional government headed by HTS in the opposition-held northwest were deployed to other areas.

Amran, the police chief, said recruitment efforts are underway to build up the forces, but he acknowledged that the current numbers are “not sufficient to control security 100 per cent”.

The new security forces have also struggled to stem the proliferation of weapons in the hands of civilians or non-state groups, he said.

Al-Sharaa has said that the country's patchwork of former rebel groups will come together in one unified national army, but it remained unclear exactly how that would happen or whether the groups can avoid infighting.

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