The Syrian truce ‘is truly dead’, 65 die on Saturday

Fighting raged across Syria on Saturday Fighting raged across Syria on Saturday as an air raid struck near Damascus. The Syrian Network reported that 65 Syrians were killed by the regime forces on Saturday. The truce, meant to start on Friday, conditionally agreed by the regime and the rebel Free Syrian Army raised the prospect of the first real halt to the fighting after 19 months of conflict.
But after fresh fighting on both Friday and Saturday, rebels and a monitoring group declared the ceasefire well and truly dead.
As clashes between President Bashar Assad's forces and rebels continued, a Syrian warplane struck a building in a rebel-held area east of Damascus that has been the scene of heavy fighting for weeks, killing eight.
"This was the first fighter jet air strike since the declaration of a truce for the four-day Eid al-Adha holiday,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"The truce is dead," the group's director Rami Abdel Rahman commented. "We can no longer talk of a truce."
A rebel commander in the northern city of Aleppo said there was no doubt the ceasefire initiative, proposed by UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, had collapsed.
"This is a failure for Brahimi. This initiative was dead before it started," Abdel Jabbar al-Okaidi, head of the FSA military council in Aleppo, told Agence France Presse by telephone.
He insisted the FSA had not broken the ceasefire and was only carrying out defensive actions.
"I was on several fronts yesterday and the army did not stop shelling," Okaidi said. "Our mission is to defend the people; we are not the ones attacking."
The Eid holiday had started Friday with a slowdown in the fighting -- and state television broadcast footage of Assad smiling and chatting with worshippers at a Damascus mosque -- but quickly degenerated.
The Observatory, a key monitor of the conflict, said 146 people were killed in bombings and fighting on Friday, including 53 civilians, 50 rebels and 43 members of Assad's forces.
On Saturday, fresh violence killed at least another 29 people, the Observatory said, amid clashes and attacks in Damascus province, Aleppo, Daraa in the south and the eastern city of Deir Ezzor.
Among the dead were five killed in a car bomb attack in Deir Ezzor, it said. State television blamed the attack on "terrorists" and said the bomb had gone off in front of a church, causing significant damage.
According to the Observatory, a total of more than 35,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which began as an anti-regime uprising but is now a civil war pitting mainly Sunni rebels against Assad's regime dominated by his minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
The Britain-based Observatory relies on a countrywide network of activists, lawyers and medics in civilian and military hospitals. It says its tolls take into account civilian, military, and rebel casualties.
Assad's forces and the FSA had both agreed to a call by Brahimi to lay down their arms for the Eid, but both also reserved the right to respond to attacks.
Brahimi had hoped the truce might lead to a more permanent ceasefire during which he could push for a political solution and bring aid to stricken areas of the country.
Okaidi, the FSA commander in Aleppo, said the ceasefire had been doomed from the start and that the international community needed to stop putting faith in the regime.
"The Syrian people have become guinea pigs. Every time there is an envoy who tries an initiative, while we know the regime will not respect it.
In a related context, Syrian rebel fighters in Aazaz area, posted on their Facebook page Saturday that they have detained Lebanese journalist Fida Itani, but assured that they will free him as soon as the necessary documents and information are acquired, the National News Agency said.
Itani, who works for the al-Akhbar daily, LBCI and other news channels, was detained “because his work is incompatible with the path of the Syrian revolution and rebels,” the rebels posted on their page.
The coordination of Aazaz rebels pointed out that “reports and videos have not proven yet Itani's involvement with any party that works against the revolution, but his presence as a journalist no longer receives approval in areas controlled by the rebels."
Eleven Lebanese pilgrims were kidnapped by the rebel Free Syrian Army in the northern province of Aleppo on May 22 as they were returning home from Iran.
One abductee was released in August in what his captors said was a "goodwill" gesture and another was released in September.
The kidnappers had repeatedly linked the release of the Lebanese captives to Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a close ally of the Syrian regime, apologising over his stances towards the Syrian uprising, which are counted supportive to Assad's regime.