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Syrian Students Killed in Attack on University Cafeteria Syria’s War Invades a Campus That Acted as a Sanctuary
(about 2 hours later)
DAMASCUS, Syria — Mortar shells hit a Damascus University outdoor cafe in the heart of the Syrian capital on Thursday, state television reported, killing at least 12 students in an attack that the government attributed to insurgents, who have struck with increasing audacity at President Bashar al-Assad’s epicenter of power in recent weeks. DAMASCUS, Syria — More and more students at Damascus University were skipping classes. The whack and thump of shelling in the distance punctuated the hum of the downtown campus. Some students walked miles to avoid the security checkpoints that choke traffic.
The main rebel fighting group denied responsibility, asserting that it would never target a school filled with students, and suggested that Mr. Assad’s agents had carried out the attack to inflame passions against the two-year-old rebellion in Syria. But classes continued at the Syrian capital’s flagship university, and many students kept coming. The university, where President Bashar al-Assad and many other Syrian elites completed their studies, became a sanctuary for young people still preparing for a future, however uncertain, when their country would not be in the midst of a ferocious civil war.
The attack at the outdoor cafe, near the civil engineering faculty building, was one of the deadliest to afflict an affluent enclave of Damascus that had been relatively insulated from much of the fighting. An orange-and-yellow awning that had shielded cafe tables was drooped and riddled with holes. Pools of blood congealed on the concrete patio, littered with upended plastic chairs and packs of Gauloises and Winston cigarettes. Then, on Thursday afternoon, a mortar shell crashed into the engineering campus, through the orange canvas awning of a cafe where students were smoking Gauloise cigarettes, chatting and studying on a shiny spring day, in what could have been a university scene playing out anywhere. The blast killed at least 10 students and injured 29, soaking the concrete floor with blood.
Mr. Assad’s government has actively sought to incubate an aura of normalcy in the center of Damascus despite the mayhem that has flared in other parts of the capital, but that effort has increasingly faltered. In recent weeks, central Umayyad Square and the nearby Tishreen presidential palace have been targeted in insurgent mortar attacks, although there had been few casualties. With it, the war invaded a campus that, like much of Damascus, the Syrian capital, had done its best to go about its business.
Last week, a bombing at a Damascus mosque near Mr. Assad’s Baath Party headquarters killed more than 40 people including the top Sunni Muslim cleric in the country. “I was laughing,” recalled Abdelhamid Rifai, a third-year civil engineering student who was taking a break from an exam as a cool wind tossed the eucalyptus trees overhead. “I straightened my chair, and then it happened.”
Students interviewed after the attack on the outdoor cafe said it had been carried out as the civil engineering school was conducting an important exam. Normally, they said, at least 400 students would have been taking the exam, but increasing fears of war-related violence had led to heavy absenteeism, and the number of test takers was more like 50. The blast was deafening. Blue and orange plastic chairs flipped over. Students helped carry away the dead and the injured, then filed out of the gate, many holding hands and pressing cellphones to their ears to reassure worried parents.
The Associated Press, quoting an unidentified Syrian official, said at least 20 people were wounded in the university attack. The engineering dean vowed to reopen next week, but for some students, the attack, which came two days after a shell exploded a few hundred yards away, signaled the end of normal studies.
State media blamed the attack on what it called terrorists, the government’s generic term for armed rebels who have been fighting to topple Mr. Assad, calling it a “barbaric massacre.” Roaa Salem, an architecture student, had dreamed before the war of designing artistic buildings and, since the crisis began, of rebuilding her damaged country. On Thursday, though, standing outside the hospital room of a friend injured in the attack, she said she would not return.
Loaey Mikdad, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, the main rebel fighting group, denied responsibility. “This is just inhumane and we would not do it,” Mr. Mikdad said in a telephone interview. “I know Syria needs us right now,” said Ms. Salem, her pink-striped boatnecked sweater stained with blood from a shrapnel wound to her shoulder. “But ... ” she said, her voice trailing off.
It is certainly not the first time during the conflict that university students have been killed or wounded on campus. Two months ago more than 80 people were killed at Aleppo University — also during exams — when multiple explosions possibly caused by airstrikes or bombs struck near a dormitory complex. The Assad government and insurgents accused each other of responsibility in that attack. “Enough,” she then added. “I give up.”
More than 70,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, which began as a peaceful political uprising against the Assad government in March 2011. The Syrian war had already transformed the lives of many students. They have lost friends to attacks off campus. They struggle to concentrate on their work. They file into class past armed guards; some have joined neighborhood militias. And their great debates have been about one thing — the war.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad from Damascus, Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon, Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

“It’s all we think about — what should we do, how should we act?” Ms. Salem said.
The common view, she said, is that “Syria is a victim between two forces” — Russia, which backs Mr. Assad, and the United States, which backs the opposition — and that “ignorance” in Syrian society is fertile ground for war.
But Ms. Salem and her classmates disagree on the solution. Some, whom she called extremists, back a military solution that crushes the armed uprising, which began as a political protest movement that many Damascus students joined. But most, she said, want a political settlement.
“The majority want a compromise,” she said. “It’s impossible to bring things back under control as they were.”
On Thursday, though, many students said the rebels had declared war on them — and their education.
“They want to stop our studies,” said Alaa, a student by the campus gate who was still holding the clear plastic ruler she had brought to her interrupted exam.
“They want to paralyze the country,” said the engineering dean, Mohammed Gharib, as he got in a car to drive his daughter, a first-year student, to safety.
Syria prides itself on its universities, which produce doctors and engineers who work across the Middle East and the world. Graduates of Damascus University and Syria’s many other colleges help the country maintain a middle class that is sizable by regional standards. Mr. Assad once called the university “a rallying point for the vanguard of Syrian and Arab young people.”
It is certainly not the first time during the conflict that university students have been killed or wounded on campus. Two months ago more than 80 people were killed at Aleppo University in northern Syria — also during exams — when multiple explosions possibly caused by airstrikes or bombs struck near a dormitory complex. The Assad government and insurgents blamed each other.
After Thursday’s attack, the Syrian government ordered all universities and state hospitals to pause for five minutes at noon on Monday in honor of the victims.
The government blamed the bloodshed on rebels, who have edged into outlying neighborhoods, within easy artillery range of the heart of the city. But the Free Syrian Army, the American-backed group that is trying to bring rebel groups under its command, denied responsibility and blamed the government. But many rebel groups reject the Free Syrian Army, or act on their own.
In recent weeks, shelling has repeatedly hit the center of the city. Some explosions are near plausible military targets, like the army headquarters adjacent to the engineering campus. But with weapons that are indiscriminate, many of the victims — like those killed in government airstrikes and shelling in rebel-held neighborhoods — have been noncombatants.
Half an hour after the shelling, the detritus of student life — packs of Gauloise and Winston cigarettes, a baseball cap, a pair of sunglasses — lay scattered across the cafe. The ripped awning dangled, pockmarked with holes that filtered the blinding sun. A scrolled blueprint lay in a puddle of blood.
Nearby lay a spiral notebook, on its cover a photograph of a baby wearing a pearl necklace and a pink hat. The first page was covered with words of love written in a learner’s English.
“We’ll be long together,” it read. “Want you belive in my song. Lady for so many years I thought I never find you.”
At Mujtahid Hospital, Mr. Rifai, the third-year student, said he would be back on Monday. “Why should I stop?” he said. “That’s what they want.”
He called the rebels terrorists, who were either foreigners or Syrians “in name only.”
These days, instead of staying out with friends at downtown restaurants, he said he heads home at 4 p.m. to watch television or help a neighborhood militia keep watch for suspicious strangers.
Down the hallway of the hospital, a wail arose. A woman had just been told that her only son, a soldier, had been killed by a sniper. Mr. Rifai’s jaw went slack, and his eyes filled with ears.
Nearby, Ms. Salem, the architecture student, seemed to be in mourning for a former self.
Before the conflict began, she and other students designed mock-ups of a new library and cafeteria for the university. “It was perfect,” she said, a smile of pride flickering across her face.
But this year, she said, her grades have plummeted. All her efforts at creativity, she said, come to “failure, failure, failure.”
Asked why, she tried to speak, but her voice cracked. “I lost my friend,” she said.
Her roommate, Isra Toma, was killed by a sniper on her way to turn in a class project. Ms. Toma had just turned 21, and Ms. Salem had made her a birthday present, a photograph of the two of them, encased in a glass bottle.
“I never got to give it to her,” she said, fingering a rhinestone bracelet — Ms. Toma’s.
Her father, she said, had long urged her to keep studying. But after the bombing, she said he told her: “Come back. It’s over.”
She is not sure when she will make it home to the town of Sweida. The roads, she said, are too dangerous.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad from Damascus; Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon; Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Rick Gladstone from New York.