Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Lina Sinjab in Damascus: "The damage affected many civilian buildings" 
 
 A massive car bomb explosion in the Syrian capital, Damascus, has killed at least 53 people and injured another 200, reports say. 
 
 Syria blamed "terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda" for the blast, which hit a central district near the headquarters of Syria's ruling Baath Party. 
 
 TV pictures showed images of bodies, wrecked cars and shattered windows. 
 
 The violence comes as Russia and the Arab League say they want to broker direct government-opposition talks. 
 
 No group has yet admitted the attack. 
 
 The Syrian foreign ministry blamed the bombing on "armed terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda that receive financial and logistic help from abroad". 
 
 The militant Islamist al-Nusra Front previously said it had carried out many of the bombings that have rocked Syria since the uprising began in March 2011. 
 
 Meanwhile Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the war as "a road to nowhere". 
 
 The opposition Syrian National Coalition is holding a two-day meeting in Egypt to discuss a framework for a possible solution. 
 
 Also on Thursday, the UN and Arab League envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, agreed to remain in office through the rest of 2013, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky told the Associated Press. Mr Brahimi's contract was due to expire on Friday. 
 
 The UN has estimated up to 70,000 people have died in the conflict in the past two years. 
 
 'Upside down' 
 
 Police and witnesses said the blast was a car bomb. It went off in the central Mazraa neighbourhood, close to the Baath offices and Russian embassy. 
 
 State and pro-regime TV showed pictures of dead bodies and destroyed cars. State media said at least 53 were killed and another 200 injured in the blast. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based activist group, said at least 42 had died, most of them civilians. 
 
 Surrounding roads are reported to have been closed off to traffic and firefighters and medical staff were soon at the scene. 
 
 Image caption Images from state media showed wounded Syrians reeling from the blast 
 
 Witnesses told AP news agency the car had exploded at a security checkpoint between the Russian embassy and the Baath Party central headquarters. 
 
 "It was huge. Everything in the shop turned upside down,'' one local resident said. He said three of his employees were injured by flying glass that killed a young girl who was walking by when the blast hit. 
 
 "I pulled her inside the shop but she was almost gone. We couldn't save her. She was hit in the stomach and head." 
 
 State media said the explosion had struck near a school and clinic and that schoolchildren were among the casualties. 
 
 It seems to have been targeted at the Baath party offices, but also affected residential areas, says the BBC's Lina Sinjab in Damascus. 
 
 Heavy fighting between government and rebel forces continued around the city, with the government carrying out air strikes in the suburbs. 
 
 Shortly after the car bomb, two mortars were fired at a military headquarters in Damascus, reports say. 
 
 And there were two other explosions in the city, also at security checkpoints, according to the SOHR. 
 
 The UK-based activist group is one of the most prominent organisations documenting and reporting incidents and casualties in the Syrian conflict. The SOHR says its reports are impartial, though its information cannot be independently verified. 
 
 Opposition 'softens' 
 
 Mr Lavrov said the Kremlin and the Arab League wanted to establish direct contact between the Syrian government and the opposition. 
 
 Speaking in Moscow, where he hosted league officials and several Arab foreign ministers, the Russian foreign minister said that sitting down at a negotiating table was the only way to end the conflict without irreparable damage to Syria. 
 
 "Neither side can allow itself to rely on a military solution to the conflict, because it is a road to nowhere, a road to mutual destruction of the people," he said. 
 
 Mr Lavrov and Arab League General Secretary Nabil Elaraby said their priority was to create a transitional government to navigate a way out of the violence. 
 
 No conditions for the negotiations have been set, they said. 
 
 The proposal initially received a cool reception from the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), with senior member Abdelbaset Sieda insisting Mr Assad and his allies "must go first". 
 
 "After that we can discuss with others in the regime who didn't share in the killing of our people," he said. 
 
 But the news agency Reuters says it has seen a draft SNC communique being discussed in Cairo which demonstrates an apparent softening in the group's stance. 
 
 The document reasserts the group's position that Mr Assad's apparatus cannot be part of any political solution in Syria, but omits previous demands that Mr Assad's regime must go even before any talks, Reuters says. 
 
 But that may still prove unacceptable in Damascus, says the BBC's James Reynolds in Istanbul. ||||| BEIRUT A car bomb killed more than 50 people and wounded 200 in central Damascus on Thursday when it blew up on a busy highway close to ruling Baath Party offices and the Russian Embassy, state media and activists said. 
 
 Syrian television showed charred and bloodied bodies strewn across the street after the blast, which it described as a suicide bombing by "terrorists" battling President Bashar al-Assad. It said 53 people were killed. 
 
 Central Damascus has been relatively insulated from almost two years of unrest and civil war in which around 70,000 people have been killed across the country, but the bloodshed has shattered suburbs around the capital. 
 
 Rebels who control districts to the south and east of Damascus have attacked Assad's power base for nearly a month and struck with devastating bombs over the last year. 
 
 The al Qaeda-linked rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra, which claimed responsibility for several of those bombs, says it carried out 17 attacks around Damascus in the first half of February, including at least seven bombings. 
 
 Activists said most of the victims of Thursday's attack in the city's Mazraa district were civilians, including children, possibly from a school behind the Baath building. 
 
 Opposition activists reported further explosions elsewhere in the city after the explosion which struck shortly before 11 a.m. (0900 GMT). 
 
 One resident in the heart of the capital heard three or four projectiles whistling through the sky, followed by explosions. At least one of them landed in a public garden in the Abu Rummaneh district, she said, but no one was hurt. 
 
 EMBASSY DAMAGED 
 
 The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors violence via a network of sources inside Syria, said the Mazraa car bomb was detonated at a checkpoint close to the Baath Party building, located about 200 meters (660 feet) from the Russian embassy. 
 
 It said 56 people were killed, of which at least 15 were from Syria's security forces and the rest civilians. Eight other people were killed by a car bomb in the Barzeh district of northeast Damascus, one of several explosions which followed the Mazraa attack. 
 
 Russia's Itar-Tass news agency quoted a diplomat as saying the Mazraa blast blew out windows at the Russian Embassy, but no employees were wounded. "The building has really been damaged ... The windows are shattered," the diplomat said. 
 
 The vehicle was carrying between 1 and 1.5 metric tons (1.65 tons) of explosives, Damascus Governor Bishr Sabban told Reuters. 
 
 A correspondent for Syrian television said he saw seven body bags with corpses at the scene. He counted 17 burnt-out cars and another 40 that were destroyed or badly damaged by the force of the blast, which ripped a crater 1.5 meters deep into the road. 
 
 Syrian TV said security forces had detained a would-be suicide bomber with five bombs in his car, one of them weighing 300 kg (440 pounds). 
 
 In the southern city of Deraa, where the uprising against Assad erupted in March 2011, warplanes bombed the city's old district for the first time in nearly two years of conflict, killing 18 people, activists said. 
 
 A rebel officer in the Tawheed al-Janoub brigade which led a rebel offensive this week in Deraa said there were at least five air strikes on the city on Thursday. 
 
 "The (rebel) attacks on several major checkpoints in the Hay al-Saad neighborhood and its declaration as a liberated area have prompted this response," said Abdullah Masalmah, an activist from the city, via Skype. 
 
 Fighting has intensified in southern Syria in recent weeks, leading to a sharp increase in refugee flows to neighboring Jordan, according to officials. A Jordanian military source said 4,288 refugees arrived in the last 24 hours alone. 
 
 Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Damascus-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was lightly wounded by an explosion in a mosque next to his office, a DFLP official said. 
 
 Talal Abu Tharifa told Reuters in Gaza that glass fragments had caused a slight wound to Hawatmeh's hand. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Marwan Makdesi in Damascus, Laila Bassam and Mariam Karouny in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Alissa de Carbonnel in Moscow; Editing by Andrew Roche)
– Two car bombs rocked Damascus this morning around 7:30 local time, killing civilians and security forces, report al-Jazeera and AP. State media reports 27 dead and more than 100 injured. One bomb hit the criminal security department and the other the aviation intelligence department. The usual blame game unfolded: The government said the explosions were the work of terrorists, but rebel groups said the bombs were the work of the government, done to discredit the opposition. The explosions followed renewed fighting around the capital yesterday, as violence returned to the Damascus suburbs for the first time since early February, according to the AP. The Syrian government had been reporting it was on the verge of crushing the rebels, but the new fighting shows its struggles to conduct offensives in more than one area at a time. "Every time the regime controls a specific area we witness clashes in new regions," said one activist. Syria's foreign minister, meanwhile, sent a letter to the UN Security Council yesterday saying the crackdown would continue.