BEIRUT: Fighting, air raids and a car bombing shook Syria Sunday, monitors said, as the international community looked to pick up the pieces of a failed bid to halt the violence for a Muslim holiday cease-fire.
 
“The cease-fire is practically over. Damascus has been under brutal air raids since day one and hundreds of people have been arrested,” said veteran opposition campaigner Fawaz Tello.
 
“Assad has been trying to use the truce to seize back control of areas of Damascus,” said Tello, who is well connected with rebels.
 
Speaking from Berlin, Tello said Sunni districts in the city of Homs and surrounding countryside came under Syrian army shelling Sunday.
 
Both sides in the 19-month-old conflict have violated the cease-fire intended to mark the Muslim religious holiday of Eid al-Adha. The halt in fighting, brokered by international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, was supposed to have come into effect Friday, the first day of the holiday.
 
An army statement Sunday blamed the cease-fire’s collapse on “violations” by rebels. The rebels for their part have said they have only reacted to regime attacks, claiming that a cease-fire is impossible while Assad continues to move his tanks and use heavy artillery and jets against populated areas.
 
Brahimi hopes to end the conflict that has killed at least 32,000 people and worsened instability in the Middle East.
 
The appeal had won widespread international support, including from Russia, China and Iran, President Assad’s main foreign allies.
 
But the plan seems destined to share the fate of failed peace efforts that have preceded it, with dozens of people continuing to be killed daily and international and regional powers at odds while they back different sides.
 
A sectarian divide between Assad’s minority Alawite sect and Syria’s majority Sunnis is also growing, fuelling religious fervor in the region and driving more foreign jihadists into the country.

 With hopes shattered of even a temporary halt to the bloodshed, diplomats said Brahimi is now looking ahead to new efforts to tackle the crisis.
 
He is to go to the U.N. Security Council in November with new proposals aimed at pushing for political talks between Assad and the opposition, U.N. diplomats told AFP, and will head this week for Russia and China to discuss the crisis.
 
Brahimi will “come back with some ideas for Security Council activity early next month,” said one U.N. diplomat.
 
“The political process will not start until Assad and the opposition have battered each other so much that there is no choice. They are not there yet, but Brahimi has some ideas,” added another envoy at the Security Council.
 
In Damascus activists and residents reported large explosions and plumes of smoke rising over the city Sunday as Syrian air force jets bombed the suburbs of Zamalka, Irbin, Harasta and Zamalka.
 
A statement by the Harasta Media Office , an opposition activists’ group, said aerial and ground bombardments had killed at least 45 people in the district since Friday.
 
Electricity, water and communications had been cut and dozens of wounded at the Harasta National Hospital had been moved as the bombardment closed in, the statement said.
 
Activists also reported fighting in the suburb of Douma to the northeast, where Free Syrian Army fighters have been attacking roadblocks manned by forces loyal to the government.
 
An airstrike on Idlib province in northwest Syria killed at least 16 people, including seven children and five women, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
 
“The number of people killed in the airstrike in the village of Bara in Jabal al-Zawiya has risen to at least 16,” the Observatory said, revising an earlier death toll of four. The Observatory said Bara has been under rebel control since mid-July.
 
Warplanes also hit towns and villages in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor and Aleppo, where rebels have been trying to push their advantage in rural areas by cutting off supply lines to the major cities, none of which has fallen completely under opposition control.
 
Fighting in Aleppo continued, with rebels attacking several roadblocks manned by Assad loyalists and a 20-year-old girl was killed in army bombardment on Suleiman al-Halabi neighborhood, opposition activists said.
 
Rebel attempts to portray themselves as a united alternative to Assad suffered a setback when clashes broke out Saturday in Ashrafieh, a Kurdish district of Aleppo that had up to now stayed out of the fighting. Armed clashes broke out between opposition fighters and members of the Syrian branch of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).
 
Mouhaimen al-Rumaid, coordinator for the opposition Syrian Rebel Front, said the fighting erupted when PKK fighters helped Assad’s forces defend a security compound in Ashrafieh that came under rebel attack.
 
Rumaid said scores of people died and rebels seized dozens of PKK members.
 
“The Ashrafieh incident has to be contained because it could extend to other areas in the northeast where the PKK is well organized,” he said.