Mortar shells struck the cafeteria of the university’s architecture department in the central Baramkeh district killing 15 people, according to the Associated Press.

State media blamed the attack on “terrorists,” while the opposition attributed it to the government.

Loaey Mikdad, a spokesman for the rebel Free Syrian Army, denied the government’s allegations that the FSA had attacked the university, he told the New York Times in a telephone interview.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the attack but put the toll at 10 people.

“The bombing of the Damascus University School of Architecture is a crime against the sanctity of universities and student life,” The Syrian National Coalition said in a statement.

“In continuation of its heinous crimes, and after the bombing of the University of Aleppo earlier this year, the Assad regime has once again attacked students with the bombing of the School of Architecture in Damascus. Dozens of students have been killed and injured. The Syrian regime continues to commit such unprecedented crimes in hopes of rebuilding the wall of fear that the children of Daraa tore down two years ago. The regime repeats these heinous crimes with the reassurance of international silence, which the regime views as a green light.”

The university mortar attack came as Syrian officials denied accusations by the opposition that an Iranian cargo plane carrying weapons to Assad’s regime was hit as it landed at Damascus International Airport.

“Damascus International Airport Administration stressed Thursday that work is continuous in the Airport normally and regularly, as the reception of the arriving plans and the departure of those travelling I is normal,” state-run media SANA said.

It added that news circulated by some media outlets, which are partners in the bloodshed of the Syrians, regarding the airport is false and untrue.

Separately, the Syrian opposition coalition, opened its first embassy in the Qatari capital Doha on Wednesday.

“I had promised the great people of this nation (Syria), and I promised God that I will resign if things reached some red lines, and I will keep my promise today and announce my resignation from the National Coalition; so that I can work with freedom that is not available inside the official institutions,” Moaz al Khatib said in a statement on facebook.

He did not explain what had prompted his resignation.

“Our message to everyone is that the solution to the Syrian crisis will be taken by the Syrians, and the Syrians alone,” he added.

Neither the Coalition’s presidential office nor its general assembly has accepted Khatib’s resignation, AFP reported.

The surprise resignation comes just days after the first election in Istanbul of a rebel prime minister, Ghassan Hitto, and just over two years on from the outbreak of a popular revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.

“For the past two years, we have been slaughtered by an unprecedentedly brutal regime, while the world has looked on,” Khatib said.

Hito, chosen from 12 candidates, is the second Kurdish opponent who took a senior official position in Syrian opposition after Abdulbasid Seyda.

Until last year, Hitto was a senior IT executive at a technology communications company in Texas.

Hitto’s election follows two failed attempts to form interim governments due to a lack of consensus between the opposition.

Meanwhile, leaders of Syria’s main opposition group will attend an Arab League summit this week, the Qatari prime minister said on Sunday, according to AP.

The Arab League has suspended Assad’s membership and recognized the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) as the legitimate representative of the people of Syria.

Arab League foreign ministers agreed March 6 to arm Syrian rebels, and invited the opposition coalition to take the League seat.

Hitto , who will now be in charge of forming a government based inside Syria won 35 out of 48 votes cast by the Syrian National Coalition’s 63 active members after an hours-long meeting in Istanbul, according to Al Jazeera.

Hito, chosen from 12 candidates, is the second Kurdish opponent who took a senior official position in Syrian opposition after Abdulbasid Seyda.

Until last year, Hitto was a senior IT executive at a technology communications company in Texas.

Hito was born in Syrian capital in 1963, received an MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University in 1994.

Hitto’s election follows two failed attempts to form interim governments due to a lack of consensus between the opposition.

The latest effort to set up a transitional government in the rebel-controlled areas comes after two years of bloody conflict in Syria.

Meanwhile in a related development, Lebanese President Michel Sleiman on Tuesday denounced as “unacceptable violation of Lebanese sovereignty” air raids carried out by Syrian warplanes against targets inside Lebanese territory.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also condemned the incident saying that it “constitutes a significant escalation in the violations of Lebanese sovereignty that the Syrian regime has been guilty of. These kinds of violations of sovereignty are absolutely unacceptable.”

France also said on Monday President Bashar al-Assad’s forces had seriously violated the sovereignty of Lebanon.

Syria’s main opposition group said twelve candidates are running for interim prime minister of a government to rule rebel-controlled areas in Syria, the associated Press reported.

A spokesman for the Syrian National Coalition told the Associated Press on Sunday that the list of 12 candidates includes candidates in exile and at least two who live in areas held by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad who are fighting the rebels.

The Coalition is to meet on March 18-19 in Istanbul while the vote is to be completed on Tuesday.

Two previous attempts at elections were postponed due to a lack of consensus on the choice of premier.

The latest effort to set up a transitional government in the rebel-controlled areas comes after two years of bloody conflict in Syria.

In recent months, rebels have seized additional territory and now control large parts of mainly northern and eastern Syria.

In a related development, Syrian rebels on Sunday seized a Syrian military intelligence compound in the southern Hauran Plain near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, rebel commanders said, according to Reuters.

Meanwhile, the Arab League said on March 6 it is prepared to hand Syria’s seat in the organization to the opposition battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

The Arab League suspended Syria’s membership in late 2011.

The coalition’s leader Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib announced Monday on Facebook that his group will now attend the Friends of Syria meeting after consultations with its members and others, as well as based on remarks by senior diplomats from the United States and the UK.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in remarks in Berlin today that Syrian rebels should be given aid if President Bashar al- Assad refuses to join talks and goes on killing his own people.

Initially, the Syrian National Coalition threatened to boycott the Friends of Syria meeting to protest what it sees as a lack of effective action from the international community.

For his part, Syria’s foreign minister has said that his government is ready to hold talks with all parties, including armed rebels who want dialogue to end the crisis in the country .

Walid al-Muallem made the comments on Monday in Moscow before talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

The unrest began in March 2011, when al-Assad’s government began a brutal crackdown on protesters calling for the ouster of president Bashar al-Assad.

The protest movement eventually evolved into an armed conflict, one that has cost the lives of more than 70,000 Syrians to flee to neighboring nations, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.

Over an eight-week period from mid-December, 255,000 Syrians fled their country. Out of the 860,000 refugee total, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey are together sheltering 97 per cent of them.

Humanitarian agencies are trying to keep up with the rising needs. The World Food Programme is scaling up to meet the needs of 2.5 million people by April.

The decision comes as a protest against the Friday attack on the city of Aleppo, which, the opposition claims, left hundreds of civilians killed.

“Hundreds of civilians have been killed by Scud missile strikes,” according to a statement released by the SNC.

“In protest of this appalling international stand, the coalition has decided to suspend its participation in the Rome 
conference for the Friends of Syria and turn down invitations to visit Russia and the United States.”

British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported 29 civilian deaths, including women and children on Friday by the bombardment of the Tariq al-Bab neighbourhood in Aleppo.

“The regime bombardment is thought to be the result of surface-to-surface missiles. The number is likely to increase because there are more than 150 injured persons as a result of the bombardment,” according to the Observatory.

The attack on the city of Aleppo came one day after Syrian government targets in central Damascus were hit by multiple car bombings that were among the deadliest so far in the nearly 23-month conflict.

Meanwhile, in Cairo, the SNC said that it was making efforts to name a transitional government in the coming days.

SNC spokesman said that the prime minister would be named on March 2 during a meeting in Istanbul, after consultations were held within the opposition, according to Reuters.

Almost two years after the revolt against Assad more than 70,000 have been killed, according to the United Nations.

However, Syrian opposition groups were quick to reject the new peace initiative by President Bashar al-Assad. George Sabra, vice president of the opposition National Coalition, told Reuters the peace plan Assad put at the heart of his speech did “not even deserve to be called an initiative.”

The president’s rare address on Sunday in a hall at the opera House in central Damascus, his first since June, said the new initiative could only get under way when Western countries stop funding and arming rebels and said he is ready to hold a dialogue with those “who have not betrayed Syria”.

Assad said his nation is in a “state of war”.

“We do not reject political dialogue … but with whom should we hold a dialogue? With extremists who don’t understand any language but that of terrorism?”

“Or should we have dialogue with puppets brought to the country by the West,” he added.

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s speech was denounced by British Foreign Secretary William Hague as “beyond hypocritical” while Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had simply repeated empty promises in his speech in Damascus on Sunday, and called for a swift transition in the war-torn country.

“His remarks are just repetitions of what he’s said all along. They are the same promises he made to us,” Davutoglu said.

Meanwhile, EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said Brussels would “look carefully if there is anything new in the speech, but we maintain our position that Assad has to step aside and allow for a political transition” while State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said his initiative is detached from reality, undermines the efforts of Joint Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi, and would only allow the regime to further perpetuate its bloody oppression of the Syrian people.

George Sabra currently residing in Turkey said his election showed that the SNC was not sectarian, and he appealed for more weapons to help overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, according to the BBC.

Farouq Tayfour, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected his vice president.

The SNC’s 41-member general secretariat, itself newly elected, chose Sabra, who garnered 28 votes, as part of efforts to revamp the group working to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

Earlier on Friday, the umbrella group elected 11 members to sit on its executive committee.

The executive committee members included Abdel baeset Sayda, the SNC’s former head.

The SNC is set to start talks on Saturday with other Syrian factions including representatives of rebel groups inside Syria on forming a new, wider body that hopes to gain international recognition as a transitional government, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week called the SNC unrepresentative of opposition forces on the ground.

However, the Syrian National Council, vying to keep its leading role and under US pressure to unify, on Friday called for a delay to a decision on bringing together all groups opposed to President Bashar al-Assad.

However, a major activist network, the Local Coordination Committees quit the bloc accusing SNC of being unable to adopt a “serious ad effective reform plan” .

“Several attempts have been made by the Local Coordination Committees in Syria to push the Syrian National Council and its leadership to adopt a serious and effective general reform plan so that the SNC can assume its role as a political representative of the great people of Syria,” the Local Coordination Committees said in a statement.

“Therefore, the Local Coordination Committees hereby declares its withdrawal from the Syrian National Council.”

“I think that the cost of a foreign invasion of Syria – if it happens – would be bigger than the entire world can bear … this will have a domino effect that will affect the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” he said.

Earlier this week, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that Mr Assad could be allowed safe passage out of the country in order to end the nation’s crisis.

But appearing on the Russian Arabic-language channel Russia Today, Mr Assad said “I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country,” he said. “I am Syrian, I was made in Syria, I have to live in Syria and die in Syria,”

It was not clear where the interview took place. The full interview will be broadcast on Friday, the TV station said.

Russia has remained one of Syria’s most loyal allies, protecting Damascus from international action at the United Nations Security Council.

Assad’s remarks coincided with a meeting in Qatar on Thursday of Syria’s fractious opposition to hammer out an agreement on a new umbrella body uniting rebel groups inside and outside Syria amid growing international pressure to form a more cohesive and representative opposition.

The Syrian National Council’s general assembly of some 420 members chose a 40-member leadership body after hours of voting at a conference held at a hotel in the Qatari capital of Doha, according to Reuters. The 40-member group is to choose an 11-member executive body and an SNC president later Thursday.

Meanwhile, two civilians, a woman and a young man, in Turkey’s Hatay border province were wounded by stray bullets fired from Syria, according to a Turkish official. According to the same source, Ankara has officially requested that NATO deploy Patriot missiles along the border with Syria, over fears that armed conflict could spill across the border.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombing in the village of Ziyara in the central province of Hama was carried out by Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist group. Activists from the area reported that the operation was in coordination with other armed rebel groups.

The attack was one of the deadliest on pro-regime forces since the start of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assadin March last year.

The observatory also reported that more than 20 rebel fighters were killed by a fighter jet air-strike on the town of Harem in the northern province of Idlib. A rebel leader in the town was also seriously injured and is thought to be dead.

State-run TV SANA and the Britain-based Observatory said a car bomb attack had also killed 11 people and wounded dozens in the west Damascus district of Mazzeh.

The rebels have scored significant gains in recent weeks and now hold swathes of territory in the country’s north, but have struggled to gain ground in and around Damascus and in the commercial hub Aleppo amid heavy bombardment from government air power, according to AFP.

The escalating conflict has added importance to a meeting of the Syrian National Council in Qatar, where Washington is pushing for an overhaul of the opposition as U.S. officials have expressed disappointment with the SNC’s inability to create a consistent plan and its lack of agreement and cooperation with different internal groups.

Syrian opposition factions were at odds Monday in talks seeking to forge unity Washington says is needed to oust the Assad regime.

The Syrian National Council, the main exiled opposition coalition, based Turkey, disagreed with a U.S.-backed proposal to set up a larger umbrella group the BBC reported.

The new group, proposed by well-known exiled dissident Riad Seif, would include representation of rebel fighters, opposition military councils and minority groups.