Students killed in Syria protest

Syrian troops killed four students in a campus raid on Thursday that human rights monitors said could mark a turning point for the second-largest city Aleppo in the more than 13-month uprising.

The four students died and 28 more were wounded, three of them critically, when government forces and armed supporters stormed the dormitories at Aleppo University following a campus demonstration, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said some 200 students were also arrested during the night-time raid.

Following the violence, the university, the country’s second-largest, announced it was suspending classes until final exams on May 13.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Observatory, said the events could mark a turning point for Syria’s second city and commercial powerhouse, which has remained relatively calm since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime broke out in March last year. “The city of Aleppo hasn’t joined the anti-regime revolt thus far but the seriousness of these events will push residents to mobilise in solidarity with the students,” he told AFP. “Security forces stormed the university in response to increased student protests lately inside and outside the campus,” he said.

“The university suspended classes because neither the management nor the security forces seem able to control the situation.”

Students described scenes of panic as regime troops entered the dormitories, with some pupils jumping from windows to avoid arrest.

“Security forces raided the dormitories and threw out students and their belongings,” Mohammed al-Halabi, an activist on the ground, told AFP via Skype, adding some of the rooms were torched.

The raid took place despite a UN-backed ceasefire that went into effect on April 12 and the presence in the country of UN observers.

A number of demonstrations broke out at universities around the country in solidarity with Aleppo’s students, including at Deir Ezzor, in the northeast, in the capital Damascus, and in Daraa to its south, activists said.

Elsewhere, six civilians, including a woman and child, were killed by gunfire that targeted a bus near the town of Saraqeb in Idlib province in the northwest, the Observatory said. Two other civilians as well as an army defector and a soldier were also killed.

The United Nations has accused both sides to the conflict of failing to abide by the terms of the ceasefire which it has admitted was not holding.

The plan, brokered by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, calls for a halt to fighting, the withdrawal of heavy weapons from urban areas, a daily humanitarian ceasefire, media access, an inclusive political process, and the right to demonstrate as well as the release of detainees.