Nour said he took shelter in a neighboring embassy. The shooting lasted for about 15 minutes, slowing gradually to single bursts of fire. The gunmen pitched hand grenades over the embassy walls, cracking two windows, he said.
None of the embassy staff was hurt in the attack. The 11 bystanders wounded included repairmen from the Syrian Telecommunication Establishment, an Iraqi couple and a Chinese diplomat who was standing on a nearby rooftop.
Perched behind high walls on a heavily fortified hillside, the U.S. Embassy has been at the heart of a stony diplomatic relationship in recent years. The American ambassador withdrew from the Damascus embassy after the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut. A United Nations report accused Syrian intelligence of complicity in the assassination, a charge Syria denies.
The United States also has accused Damascus of letting jihadist fighters slip across its borders to fight in Iraq, as well as tampering in Lebanese affairs and propping up anti-Israel fighters in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
In recent weeks, the United States and Israel accused Damascus of funneling weapons to Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, where battles between Israel and Shiite Muslim militants raged for 34 days in July and August.
As relations soured between Washington and Damascus in recent years, the anti-American sentiment that has flared in the Middle East since the war in Iraq also took hold in Syria.
But the U.S. is not the sole target of Islamists: The groups have also waged a long-running blood feud with secular Syria.
The government is dominated by members of the Allawite sect, a Shiite offshoot rejected by hard-line Sunnis. In the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood's attempts to oppose the regime were crushed bloodily by Assad's father, President Hafez Assad. To this day, membership in the Sunni militant group is punishable by death.
Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Syrian government has struggled to maintain the rigorous street control that once made the Assad regime famous. Syrian troops have repeatedly battled with shadowy gunmen. Tuesday's attack was the third to strike the capital in three years; all were easily repelled by security services.
The attacks have raised speculation about whether Bashar Assad is capable of keeping the country calm.
