80 die in Aleppo campus blasts, rebels say

Syrians gather at the site of an explosion Tuesday at a university in Aleppo, Syria, in this photo released by Syria’s official news agency, SANA.
Syrians gather at the site of an explosion Tuesday at a university in Aleppo, Syria, in this photo released by Syria’s official news agency, SANA.

— Twin blasts on a university campus in Syria’s largest city Tuesday set cars ablaze, blew the walls off dormitory rooms and left more than 80 people dead, anti-regime activists said.

What caused the blasts remained unclear.

Activists trying to topple President Bashar Assad’s regime said his forces carried out two airstrikes. Syrian state media, for its part, blamed rebels fighting the Syrian government, saying they fired rockets that struck the campus.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and a commercial capital, has seen prolonged attacks since rebel forces, mostly from rural areas north of the city, pushed in and began clashing with government troops last summer.

Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed in fighting and by frequent shelling and airstrikes by government forces who seek to dislodge the rebels.

The competing narratives of the two blasts at the city’s main university highlight the difficulty of confirming reports from inside Syria. The Syrian government bars most media from working in the country, making independent confirmation difficult, and both anti-regime activists and the Syria government sift the information they give the media to boost their cause.

Aleppo’s university is in the city’s northwest, a sector controlled by government forces, making it unclear why government jets would target it, as opposition activists claim.

Syria’s state news agency blamed the attack on rebels, saying they fired two missiles at the university. It said the strike occurred on the first day of the midyear exam period and killed students and people who were staying at the university after being displaced by violence elsewhere. The agency did not say how many people were killed and wounded.

The scale of destruction in videos shot at the site, however, suggested that more powerful explosives had been used than the rockets the rebels are known to possess.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights cited students and medical officials as saying that 83 people were killed in the blasts. Several of the more than 150 people injured were in critical condition, it said.

The group, which relies on a network of contacts inside Syria, said it was unclear what caused the blasts.

The university’s own press office issued a statement accusing Syrian air force MiG fighter planes of targeting the campus in two missile attacks three minutes apart, destroying buildings and causing “massive destruction in the surrounding roads.” The statement denounced the attacks as a “criminal act.”

It was unclear if the press office statement reflected the view of the leadership of the university.

Witness accounts and videos uploaded on the Internet from the campus and nearby hospital painted a picture of panic as the explosions shattered examination day with billowing smoke, flames, and showers of fragmented concrete and glass.

“I was inside my car when I heard the sound of two consecutive explosions which was preceded by the sound of a warplane,” said an anti-government activist in Aleppo reached on his mobile telephone, who for security reasons identified himself only by his first name, Tony. “There was a mess on the street created by the traffic. I saw smoke coming from dormitories. It was surprising to see the university being bombed.”

Activists also reported violence in some suburbs of Damascus, the capital, where members of the insurgent Free Syrian Army were engaged in combat with government forces in the Ain Tarma and Zamalka neighborhoods. The fighting began after a campaign of Syrian air force attacks over the past few days apparently aimed at expunging insurgents from strategic areas.

Syria’s crisis began in March 2011 with protests calling for political change. The conflict has since turned into civil war, with scores of rebel groups fighting Assad’s forces throughout the country.

The U.N. says more than 60,000 people have been killed.

Information for this article was contributed by Ben Hubbard of The Associated Press and by Rick Gladstone, Hwaida Saad and Ellen Barry of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 5 on 01/16/2013

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