Syria’s War Invades a Campus That Acted as a Sanctuary
Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
Soldiers surveyed the cafe at Damascus University where a mortar strike on Thursday killed at least 10 students and injured 29.
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: March 28, 2013
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.
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Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
At the hospital where students were being treated, Roaa Salem said she would not return to the university. “Enough,” she said.
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.
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.
With it, the war invaded a campus that, like much of Damascus, the Syrian capital, had done its best to go about its business.
“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.”
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 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.
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.
“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.
“Enough,"she then added. “I give up.”
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.
“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. The country’s many colleges help Syria 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.”
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