The wave of violence that has killed hundreds of civilians across Syria reached the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo on Monday, hours after interim leader http://Ahmed al-Sharaa vowed to bring those responsible to justice.

The reported fighting in the capital, Damascus, and the second city of Aleppo marked the first such clashes there since the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The short-lived violence in the capital followed days of clashes concentrated in former Assad strongholds along Syria's Mediterranean coast.

More than 1,300 people were killed in Syria in the three days to late Sunday, with civilians comprising 973 of the dead, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said in a statement. The death toll as of early Monday was not immediately clear.