Egypt's armed forces have killed 32 "criminal elements" in an ongoing operation against Islamists in the lawless Sinai peninsula, a military spokesman said on Saturday.

Colonel Ahmed Mohammed Ali told reporters that 38 people including "non-Egyptians" had been arrested during "Operation Sinai," which was launched on August 7, days after gunmen killed 16 soldiers at a border post there.

Syrian troops backed by tanks and helicopters repelled a rebel attack on an army base in the northern city of Aleppo on Saturday after a 20-hour battle, military officials and witnesses said.

The government forces pushed rebels out of the Hanano military base, a fortress-like compound in the east of the city, parts of which rebels claimed to have captured on Friday, they said.

Gunmen fired at a police station in Egypt's North Sinai on Saturday, but there were no casualties, security officials told AFP.

The gunmen, riding in two vehicles, opened fire at the Sheikh Zuwayyid police station near Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip at dawn, the officials said.

Mortar rounds or rockets fired from Syria killed a young Iraqi girl and wounded four people in a border town in western Iraq, an army officer and the interior ministry said on Saturday.

Captain Ali Juwayir from Anbar Operations Command said four mortar rounds hit al-Qaim shortly before midnight on Friday, adding that two homes in the town were struck.

Russia will press the U.N. Security Council to this month endorse a Syria peace accord that was brokered in Geneva and has since split world powers, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday.

"There is a plan to hold a special meeting of the U.N. Security Council with the participation of ministers on the Syrian issue," Lavrov said in the Russian city of Vladivostok after meeting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Thousands of people protested in Tunis on Friday, mostly supporters of the ruling Islamist party Ennahda, demanding that Tunisia be "cleansed" of corrupt remnants of the ousted Zine el Abidine Ben Ali regime.

The crowd gathered in the Kasbah, the site of government headquarters, calling for administrative purges in the media and political opposition, notably members of the exiled dictator's RCD party that once dominated Tunisian politics, to be speeded up, an AFP journalist reported.

Iran's Foreign Ministry on Friday slammed the imposition by Bahrain of jail terms on 13 leading Shiite opposition figures in the Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom, state television reported.

"The only solution to the crisis in Bahrain and to restore calm and stability is to respond to the legitimate demands of the population," it quoted the ministry's spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast as saying.

Attacks in Iraq, including a series of apparently coordinated bombings against Shiite places of worship in the north, killed at least nine people on Friday, security and medical officials said.

A car bomb targeted the Khezal al-Tamimi husseiniyah, or Shiite place of worship, in central Kirkuk at about 12:55 pm (0955 GMT), followed by a bombing at Imam Ali husseiniyah in the city's northeast, and three bombings at Al-Mustafa husseiniyah in south Kirkuk, security and medical officials said.

A car bomb struck an upscale area of Damascus on Friday, near the central law courts and Ministry of Information, state TV reported just two hours after a first bomb attack in the north of the capital.

"A terrorist car bomb attack hit the Mazzeh area (west of Damascus), in a street between the justice palace and the ministry of information," the state broadcaster said.

As the number of Syrians fleeing their homes continues to soar, the United Nations refugee agency said Friday it would more than double aid to people displaced inside Syria.

"UNHCR's share of the budget in a revised Syria Humanitarian Response Plan being presented to donors this morning is more than doubling to $41.7 million," the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.