U.N. Envoy Seeks Pause in Syria for Holiday

The new Syria peace envoy from the United Nations and Arab League enlisted Iran’s help on Monday in an effort to negotiate a cease-fire in observance of a three-day holiday dear to all Muslims, hoping that such a religious reprieve could become the basis for a dialogue.

The effort by the envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran Algerian statesman, was his first specific proposal for a pause in hostilities in Syria since he replaced Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, who resigned the Syria diplomatic post in frustration at the end of August.

Mr. Brahimi’s effort came as new signs emerged from Syria that the 19-month-old conflict was deepening and that combatants on both the government and insurgent sides were using increasingly sophisticated and lethal conventional weaponry.

Eliot Higgins, a British blogger whose Brown Moses blog is considered an authoritative source on arms used in the Syrian conflict, reported new evidence that the Syrian Air Force was dropping cluster bombs, which kill and damage indiscriminately. Newly posted videos on the Internet also showed what arms experts called the first known use by insurgents of heat-seeking shoulder-fired missile systems, designed to hit aircraft.

Mr. Brahimi’s spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, said in a statement that Mr. Brahimi made his appeal to Iran’s president, foreign minister and top national security official during a trip to Tehran. Iran is the only regional ally of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and is believed to be supplying weapons and training, although Iran says it is providing only humanitarian aid.

The statement quoted Mr. Brahimi as telling the Iranians that the Syria conflict was worsening by the day and that a cease-fire, timed to coincide with the forthcoming Id al-Adha holiday starting Oct. 25, “would help create an environment that would allow a political process to develop.”

Id al-Adha, or Festival of the Sacrifice, is celebrated by Shiite and Sunni Muslims to commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael as proof of obedience to God.

Both Mr. Assad and the array of insurgents seeking to topple him have shown no interest in negotiations to resolve the conflict, which has evolved into a civil war that has left more than 20,000 people dead and sent at least 340,000 refugees into neighboring countries, according to United Nations estimates. Prospects for a solution have also been complicated by hard-line Islamic jihadist fighters who have been entering Syria to fight Mr. Assad’s forces but do not share the main opposition’s goal of replacing Mr. Assad with a representative democratic government.

Reports of fighting in Syria on Monday centered mostly in and around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has been a battleground between insurgents and loyalists for nearly three months and is home to some of the world’s oldest cultural treasures. The government’s Syrian Arab News Agency reported Monday that President Assad had ordered the restoration of the 13th-century Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, a Unesco World Heritage site, which amounted to an official confirmation of reports that it had suffered damage.

But the government rejected as a lie the video evidence in the Brown Moses blog on the use of cluster munitions by the Syrian Air Force, which Human Rights Watch cited in a report on Sunday that said bomb remnants seen in the videos “all show damage and wear patterns produced by being mounted on and dropped from an aircraft.”

Syria, along with a number of other countries including the United States and Israel, has not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions that bans such weapons. According to the Landmine & Cluster Munition Monitor, an advocacy group, Syria has stockpiled cluster munitions, and the first evidence it had used them surfaced last July in videos showing cluster remnants and bomblets near the city of Hama.

On the rebel side, two new videos emerged showing the first use of the heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles, known as Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or Manpads, a far more effective weapon against Syrian aircraft than the truck-mounted machine guns insurgents had been using.

In one video, an insurgent armed with an older Manpad system known as an SA-7 is seen hiding behind a building, apparently awaiting a target. In the other, a weapon, apparently of the same class, is fired at a passing jet. It is unclear whether the aircraft was hit, but the telltale sign of a corkscrew-shaped trail of a Manpad missile is clearly visible.

“What we’re seeing here is Manpads in use,” said Matthew Schroeder, an expert on missile proliferation and arms trade at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonpartisan group in Washington. While occasional sightings of Manpad components had been made in earlier Internet videos posted from Syria, he said, “now we’re seeing them deployed, which isn’t surprising.”

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 15, 2012

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article referred imprecisely to the device used by some rebels to launch explosives. It is a giant slingshot, not a catapult, which is a more sophisticated version of a slingshot and uses many of the same principles.