The Kurdish rebel sits fiddling with his Kalashnikov looking bored when a comrade suddenly breaks into screams of "Allahu akbar" as a series of explosions reverberate from the front line.

"Take it easy, take it easy, he can't hear you," says the Kurd, sitting next to a pile of broken glass on the street, his jeans rolled up to reveal knock-off black plimsolls with the word "PRADA" written on the label.

Egypt's Coptic Christians voted on Monday for a new leader to succeed Pope Shenuda III, who died in March leaving behind a community anxious about its status under an Islamist-led government.

Nearly 2,500 eligible voters made up of Coptic public officials, MPs, journalists, local councillors were casting their ballots in Cairo's St Mark's Cathedral, seat of the Coptic papacy, to choose from among the five candidates.

Al-Qaida's front group in Iraq claimed responsibility on Monday for a series of shootings and bombings over the Eid al-Adha holiday that killed dozens of people nationwide.

The Islamic State of Iraq said the attacks over the four-day Muslim holiday from Friday were in response to the purported arrest of Sunni Arab women by Iraqi security forces in an effort to locate their wanted male relatives.

A car bomb attack killed at least 10 people in the predominantly Christian and Druze area of Jaramana near Damascus on Monday, Syrian state television said.

"A terrorist car bombing next to a bakery on Rawda Street killed at least 10 people, including women and children," the television said.

Syria's conflict is going from bad to worse, the U.N.-Arab League peace envoy said Monday after key talks in Moscow on finding a solution, expressing disappointment that his four-day truce plan had failed.

"I have said and it bears repeating again and again that the Syrian crisis is very very dangerous, the situation is bad and getting worse," envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The Syrian military on Monday launched the heaviest air strikes seen in the country since warplanes were first deployed over the summer, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"There have been 48 air raids across the country over four hours this morning. These are the heaviest air strikes since warplanes were first deployed over the summer," the watchdog's director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday voiced bitter frustration at the failure of the Syria ceasefire and stressed the need for international unity to end the violence.

"I am deeply disappointed that the parties failed to respect the call to suspend fighting," Ban said in the South Korean capital Seoul, where he received a peace prize from his home country.

Turkish artillery struck back on Monday after a shell fired from neighboring Syria ploughed into Turkish territory without causing any casualties, the state-run news agency reported.

The shell struck near the village of Besaslan in southern Hatay province amid escalating clashes between Syrian loyalist troops and rebels in the Syrian town of Haram, just across the border, Anatolia said.

Syrian warplanes hammered Damascus on Monday with loud explosions shaking the capital on the fourth day of a Muslim holiday marked by the failure of a ceasefire bid, an AFP correspondent said.

The explosions, which appeared to come from several different districts, could be heard over about two hours and were among the most intense in the city since the beginning of the 19-month conflict.

Israel has turned back dozens of African asylum-seekers, mostly Eritreans, trying enter the country from Egypt, Human Rights Watch and two other NGOs said on Sunday.

"Since June, Israeli forces patrolling Israel's newly constructed ... border fence with Egypt's Sinai region have denied entry to dozens of Africans, mostly Eritreans," HRW and Israeli NGOs the Hotline for Migrant Workers and Physicians for Human Rights said in a joint statement.