The Syrian civil war has forced many university students there to desert their studies as political stability crumbles, and some students have taken up arms, according to reports by The Guardian.
Bashar Al-Assad , president of Syria, has undertaken a year-long campaign to contain an uprising against the Assad regime, pitting Syrian government forces against the Free Syrian Army, a ragtag group of rebels who are determined to oust the regime by any means necessary. It is, essentially, a civil war.
Government tanks lumber through the streets, clumsily aiming their guns at the remains of shelled-out apartment complexes while shell-shocked conscripts watch. Rebel forces scurry among the ruins of the city, popping out only to take a shot at the passing patrols.
To the people of Aleppo, the skirmishes mark the beginning of a new period in an already chaotic conflict, but outside the noise and chatter of the street fighting in the village of Derat Azza , five men watch the battle as distant smoke plumes on the horizon. War passed through the tiny village weeks ago, ending in a rebel victory. It’s quiet now, with the exception of the occasional artillery shell and the patrols of a small rebel garrison.
Today’s crisis finds these young men just short of front-line combat, but they are anything but soldiers. It was only a few months ago that they were students at the nearby University of Aleppo, one of Syria’s most prestigious schools and a hotbed of anti-regime activism during the early days of the uprising. Like many young people who rose up during the Arab Spring, they had become fed up with the tyranny, corruption and poverty that pervades modern Syria, and blamed the Assad regime for their plight. Unlike many other street protests that have broken out in the past year, however, the students were spared the full brunt of the Syrian army’s wrath, unlike their comrades in Homs and Damascus, and were instead met with riot police and careful observation by the regime’s secret militia, the Shabiha-that is until this past May, when government forces, paranoid about the rise in rebel activity in the area, stormed the dormitories during a peaceful protest, killing four students and leading to the closure of the university. Since then, student activism in the city has ceased, but the students’ desire for change is unwavering-and to a dedicated few, that even means picking up a gun and joining the fight.
“The revolution means more than the university,” Ahmed, a chemical engineering student, said. “I didn’t go to my exams and nor did most people. This is a price that I’m more than willing to pay for now.”
Another student, Haithem, had a small pistol with him.
“The head of the faculty carried one of these too,” Haithem said. “Can you imagine that, a lecturer with a gun? He loves Bashar [al-Assad] from the bottom of his heart, and he will fail all of us in the revolution [in our exams] or tell the Shabiha where to find us.”
They made a point, however, that situation was not typical of other students.
“Most are staying quiet for now. It’s too much for them to do what we have done. Now if I went back to Aleppo I would be caught and put in prison, or killed. There are hundreds of checkpoints there. Some of them are only 20 meters apart. The city is locked down.”
That may change in the coming months, as the stability of the northern provinces continues to erode and more of Syria is drawn into a growing civil war that could eventually pit classmate against classmate.
