Fighting raged in Syria’s two biggest cities yesterday as UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi ended his first visit to the country on a peace mission that a rebel commander said was doomed to fail.

Iran admitted for the first time it has elite forces present in Syria and Lebanon, where Pope Benedict XVI added his voice to calls for an end to the bloodletting, urging Arab states to propose workable solutions.

As Brahimi made his way to the airport at the end of a four-day visit to the country, a commander of the Free Syrian Army who had an Internet conference call with the envoy yesterday said his mission would fail.

“We are sure Brahimi will fail like the other envoys before him, but we (the rebels) do not want to be the reason of his failure,” the FSA chief for Aleppo province in north Syria, Col. Abdel Jabbar Al-Okaidi, told AFP by telephone.

“We discussed the general situation in Syria, mainly focusing on the destruction wielded by the regime on the country,” said Okaidi, who talked to Brahimi along with the FSA spokesman in Syria, Col. Qassem Saadeddine, and the group’s chief in Damascus, Col. Khaled Hobous.

Okaidi accused the international community of “giving political cover to the regime” and of pushing the opposition to hold talks with the regime but without pressuring the government to stop its repression.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a helicopter strike on the town of Kafr Aweid in the northwest Syrian province of Idlib killed at least five children and one woman yesterday. According to Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, the attack came a day after five other children were killed in Saraqeb, also in Idlib province.

“This is the gift of the regime to the children of Syria on their first day back at school,” he told AFP by telephone.