International mediator Lakhdar Brahimi concluded Monday his two-day visit to Damascus during which he expressed concerns about the situation in the war-torn country despite assurances during his meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, DPA reported.
It was Brahimi's third trip to Damascus as the United Nations-Arab League envoy tasked with ending the 22-month crisis - a mission seen by some observers as having reached a "dead end".
They were meeting a day after a government airstrike on a bakery in a rebel-held town in Halfaya killed 109 people, according to opposition activists.
More than 50 people were still listed as being in a critical condition. State news agency SANA blamed "an armed terrorist group" for the attack.
"We exchanged views on what steps should be taken to end the crisis. He gave me his views and I told him what I saw in different cities I visited earlier. I extended what steps I see that should be taken to help the Syrian people," Brahimi said after meeting al-Assad.
The president said: "We want the success of all efforts which will also preserve Syria's integrity and sovereignty," according to state television, which described the meeting as cordial.
Brahimi said: "The situation in Syria is still worrying and we hope that all the parties will go towards the solution that the Syrian people are hoping for and look forward to."
Little progress has been made since Brahimi took over the post in September. Activists say that more that 42,000 have died in the conflict.
A Beirut-based Western diplomat said that "this might be (Brahimi's) last trip to Damascus if things do not move forward."
"Simply the Syrian crisis is moving nowhere, since both the opposition and the government, are refusing to talk to each ... so, the only solution will be the battlefields," the diplomat said.
Activists in Damascus told dpa that clashes erupted between rebels and al-Assad's forces in the neighbourhood of Khaled Ibn al-Walid. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said electricity had been cut off across the capital since Sunday.
In northern Aleppo province, rebels claimed they had taken control of an air force brigade barracks, confiscating "huge amounts of ammunition."
Members of the extremist al Nusra Front, who are fighting alongside the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA), overran late Monday large parts of an Alawite Maan village in the central Syrian province of Hama, the Observatory said. Alawites are an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and it is a sect to whom al-Assad belongs.
The fighting in Maan killed at least 11 rebel fighters and 20 regime troops, the observatory said.
In the central province of Homs, activists claimed a "poisonous gas" was used by government jets in the neighbourhood of Khalidiyeh.
Activist Abul Houda al-Homsi said most of the 71 people taken to hospital were suffering from breathing problems and nausea. The observatory said six rebels died of suffocation.
"Activists in Homs said six rebels died on Sunday night on the Khalidiyeh-Baayada front-line because they inhaled odorless gas," said the observatory.
Video footage posted by activists showed a man on a stretcher struggling to breathe, while a doctor tended to him with an oxygen mask.
In an interview to broadcaster Russia Today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it would be "political suicide" for al-Assad's government if it used chemical weapons against the opposition.
He said al-Assad had given Moscow repeated assurances he had no plans to use such weapons.