Bomb attacks in Baghdad and north Iraq on Tuesday killed six people, including an army colonel and three schoolboys, security officials said, a day after a spate of violence left 17 dead.

In the disputed town of Saadiyah, Diyala province, Colonel Hassan Ali was killed when a roadside bomb struck the convoy he was travelling in, Saadiyah mayor Ahmed al-Zarkushi and a provincial security command center official said.

Egyptian telecom magnate Naguib Sawiris faces trial for insulting religion after tweeting a caricature of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse in Islamic garb, an Islamist lawyer who filed a legal complaint against him said Monday.

The court will hear the case against Sawiris, a billionaire Coptic Christian who founded the liberal Free Egyptians party, on January 14, said the lawyer Mamdouh Ismail, a member of the ultra-conservative Al-Gamaa al-Islamiya group.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad will deliver a speech on Tuesday about the country's "internal matters," in a rare public address by the embattled leader, the official SANA news agency said.

"President Bashar al-Assad will give a speech before midday (1000 GMT) on Tuesday on the internal matters in Syria and developments regarding the situation in the region," SANA reported late Monday.

Attacks across Iraq on Monday, many of which targeted Shiites, killed 17 people and wounded dozens, including 15 Afghans visiting the country for religious commemorations, officials said.

The violence included multiple bombings in and around Baghdad against Shiite worshippers walking to the shrine city of Karbala, 110 kilometers south of the capital, for Arbaeen rituals later this week.

The opposition Syrian National Council denounced Monday an Arab League report on its observer mission to the country as a "step backwards" in the bid to end unrest and called on the U.N. to take over.

"The council considers the report on the work of the observers a step backwards in the efforts by the League, and does not reflect the reality seen by the observers on the ground," the SNC said in a statement received by Agence France Presse.

Syrian security forces on Monday killed 21 people across the country, 13 of them in the flashpoint central province of Homs, activists said.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said regime troops killed eighteen civilians and three army defectors, “nine of them under torture.”

Iran will not falter in the face of Western-imposed sanctions, the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in comments broadcast on state television on Monday.

"The firm decision of the Islamic Republic is to resist the pressures" of Western powers, Khamenei said.

Yemen's Prime Minister Mohammed Basindawa began a tour to the country's oil-rich Gulf neighbors on Monday to seek urgently needed aid for an economy approaching collapse.

Basindawa, formerly an opposition leader who is now leading a transitional government, heads in search of financial help while political tensions at home remain acute and protests continue against the deal that brought him to power.

Pope Benedict XVI on Monday called for a "fruitful dialogue" between political forces in Syria with independent observers present and said Arab Spring states should oppose discrimination.

"I pray for a rapid end to the bloodshed and the beginning of a fruitful dialogue between the political forces, encouraged by the presence of independent observers," he told 160 ambassadors to the Vatican in a speech.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned on Monday of a "civil war" in neighboring Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's regime is persisting with a deadly crackdown on opponents.

"The situation that has emerged there is right now heading towards a religious, sectarian and racial civil war. This must be stopped," Erdogan said at a televised press conference.