At least 17 people were killed across Syria on Saturday, activists said, as an Arab League deadline for Damascus to stop its lethal crackdown on dissent was set to expire.

Among the dead were four intelligence agents killed by gunmen who raked their car with gunfire and two mutinous soldiers who died in clashes with regular troops as the military raided the central town of Shayzar after a heavy shelling, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

Tunisia's election winners on Friday reached a power-sharing agreement under which an Islamist will be named premier and two leftists will be named president and speaker of the constitutional assembly, media reports said.

The Islamist Ennahda party nominated its deputy leader Hamadi Jebali to lead the government, while Moncef Marzouki, head of the center-left Congress for the Republic, will be named Tunisia’s president, and Mustapha Ben Jaafar, head of the left-wing Ettakatol, will be named speaker of the constitutional assembly.

An opposition MP on Friday urged the U.N. Security Council, which is to meet on Yemen, to refer President Ali Abdullah Saleh to the International Criminal Court over bloodshed linked to his refusal to quit.

"We call on the Security Council to impose sanctions on President Saleh and to refer him to the ICC," said Fued Dahaba, from the opposition Islamist party Al-Islah, leading weekly Muslim prayers near Sanaa's Change Square.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Friday of the possibility of a civil war in Syria that either is directed or influenced by Syrian army defectors.

"I think there could be a civil war with a very determined and well-armed and eventually well-financed opposition that is, if not directed by, certainly influenced by defectors from the army," Clinton told the U.S. network NBC.

The decision of the Arab League to suspend Syria is "a historic mistake" and will cause civil war in the unrest-hit country, an Iranian official said Friday, Anatolia news agency reported.

"The path the Arab League has taken is completely about defeating Syria from inside, and triggering a civil war," Anatolia quoted Alaaddin Burucerdi, the head of the Iranian parliamentary commission on foreign policy, as saying.

More than 1,000 Jordanians marched after Muslim weekly prayers on Friday in a protest called by opposition Islamists pushing for political reform and an end to corruption.

The march began outside Al-Husseini mosque in central Amman and moved towards city hall about a kilometer away.

Syria's foreign minister has sent a letter to Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi requesting changes to a proposal to send a 500-strong delegation of observers to Damascus, the Arab body said on Friday.

The pan-Arab body had agreed to send 500 members of human rights groups, media representatives and military observers to Syria, which said it would welcome them to see the situation on the ground and help implement a peace plan.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Friday called for restraint over the Syria crisis, after talks with his French counterpart who accused President Bashar Assad of being deaf to pressure.

"We are calling for restraint and caution. This is our position," Putin told a news conference, the day after his foreign minister had likened the situation in Syria to a civil war.

An Italian military training aircraft heading home from the Dubai air show crashed into the sea on Friday off the Gulf emirate, but both crew ejected safely, officials said.

"The plane crashed off Dubai shortly after taking off en route for Italy after taking part in the air show," an aviation source told Agence France Presse without speculating on the cause of the accident.

Bombings against a policeman's home and three mosques killed eight people and wounded 13 on Friday, security officials said, in the worst violence to hit Iraq in weeks.

A bomb targeting the home of a policeman in the Saqlawiya district outside the one-time insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, about 60 kilometers west of Baghdad, killed four people early on Friday, police Captain Omar Abbud said.