GENEVA — Major world powers on Saturday failed to reach a consensus on calling for the removal of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from power, agreeing instead on a plan for a political transition that seemed to have little chance of implementation.

The meeting of nine nations in Geneva, aimed at finding a way to end the bloodshed in Syria, ended in a now-familiar division, with Russia and China blocking the rest from calling for Mr. Assad’s ouster.
Kofi Annan, the United Nations and Arab League mediator who convened the so-called Action Group, tried to put the best possible spin on the agreement, which calls for the formation of a national unity government that would oversee the drafting of a new constitution and elections.
The agreement, he said, provided “a perspective for the future that can be shared by all in Syria, a genuinely democratic and pluralistic state.”
But the plan appeared to lack support from either side in the conflict.
“The Action Group on Syria just gave Assad license to kill for another year,” said Rafif Jouejati, a spokesman for the Local Coordination Committees, a Syrian opposition group.
A pro-government Baathist Party analyst in the Syrian capital, Damascus, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Assad government had its own plan for political transition: the previously scheduled presidential elections in 2014. “This is the only way to solve the country’s crisis,” he said. Syria is a one-party state and its elections are widely viewed as neither free nor fair.
The diplomatic developments were punctuated by a particularly bloody day in Syria, as more than 100 people were killed, by one estimate, most of them civilians caught in shelling.
The plan agreed to in Geneva essentially repeated Mr. Annan’s earlier six-point peace plan, which had collapsed after both sides ignored it, leading to the suspension of a United Nations monitoring mission on June 16.
The new plan demanded that all parties prepare for a democratic transition that could include opposition figures as well as current government officials chosen by “mutual agreement.” It is unclear what the new agreement can offer any of the parties to persuade them to stop fighting, and it included no suggested enforcement measures.
The Action Group, which includes the five permanent Security Council members and four Middle Eastern countries, had considered barring from the proposed unity government those “whose participation would jeopardize stability and reconciliation,” understood to be a reference to President Assad. That language was dropped from the final agreement after Russia, Mr. Assad’s strongest ally, objected.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the omission would make no difference in practice. “Assad will still have to go,” she said. “He will never pass the mutual-consent test given the blood on his hands.”
In return for these semantic concessions, she said, the United States and its allies had “made clear to Russia and China that it is absolutely incumbent on them to make clear to Assad that the writing is on the wall.”
“What we have done here is to strip away the fiction that he and those with blood on their hands can stay in power,” she added.
Russia, however, did not seem to see it that way. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov said there was no requirement that Mr. Assad step down.
“There is no attempt to impose any kind of a transition process,” he said at a news conference here. “There are no prior conditions to the transfer process and no attempt to exclude any group from the process.”
Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the United States had made a “major compromise” in dropping the demand for Mr. Assad’s ouster. He said he thought the United States capitulated because the situation in Syria was “rapidly deteriorating, so they had to get a framework in place,” adding that he expected “a long, bloody summer.”
That framework was overshadowed by the group’s division, analysts said, which mirrored that of previous efforts by the Security Council to end the fighting in Syria,
“This was the coalition of the uncooperative, the disabled and the unwilling,” said Aaron David Miller, a Wilson Center scholar and a former Mideast negotiator for the American government. “There simply is no willingness and no capacity among the so-called great powers to intercede in the Syrian conflict.”
“The revised Kofi Annan plan is doomed,” he added. “The situation is going to proceed depending on what happens on the ground.”
In Damascus, thick black smoke billowed downtown after the bombing of a police complex, according to witnesses. It was the fourth time in a week that insurgents had struck in the capital. And the Syrian Army continued for at least the fourth day its intensive shelling of Douma, a restive Sunni Muslim suburb six miles northeast of downtown Damascus.
“Massacres have become like breakfast to us,” said Imad Hosary, an activist with the Local Coordination Committees, which tracks casualties and put the death toll on Saturday at 100. A second opposition group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, recorded 81 deaths.
The worst attack took place at a funeral for an opposition activist, Abdul Hadi al-Halabi, in the Damascus suburb of Zamalka. A car bomb exploded, killing 20 to 50 people, according to various activists.
An amateur video posted on You Tube caught the moment of the explosion as the body was being carried aloft, and other activists posted videos of mangled victims and body parts scattered in the street. Mr. Halabi was killed by a government sniper on Friday, according to an activist near Zamalka reached via Skype. The activist said the final death toll might be more than 50, and he accused government forces of surrounding the scene of the bombing and firing on people trying to offer medical assistance.
Opposition activists also posted videos on YouTube showing what it said were a series of new massacres, in Souran, near Hama; in Idlib; in Dara’a; and in other places. “Syria awakens to one massacre after another since the U.N. observer mission’s absence, and Arab and international silence regarding the criminal regime’s violations,” the Local Coordination Committees said in a statement.
Details on the explosion in Damascus, which occurred around 7 a.m., were scant, but witnesses said it appeared to be in the area of the Police Academy and other heavily secured facilities in the Qaboun neighborhood. Activists said the target had been the police special forces unit, but there was no way to immediately confirm that.
SANA, the Syrian state news agency, made no mention of the attack, but did say there had been a bombing of the Finance Ministry building in the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest.
The news agency also confirmed the heavy fighting in Douma, saying a government operation there had uncovered what it said were torture chambers and field hospitals used by the rebels, which it refers to as terrorists.
“The authorities continued cracking down on armed terrorist groups and raiding the hide-outs of terrorists in Douma, killing scores of terrorists and injuring and arresting big numbers,” SANA said.
Activists in Douma said all but 100,000 of the 500,000 residents had fled the area because of heavy government shelling, followed by repeated forays into the neighborhood by the Syrian Army, which they accused of carrying out a series of massacres there in the past few days.
Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Geneva, and Rod Nordland from Beirut, Lebanon. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut; an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria; and Marc Santora from New York.