Syria’s War Invades a Campus That Acted as a Sanctuary

Soldiers surveyed the cafe at Damascus University where a mortar strike on Thursday killed at least 10 students and injured 29. 

 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. 

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.”

It is 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. 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 simply 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 asked. “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.