Clashes between loyalists of Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh and protesters from the defense ministry demanding an end to corruption left two people injured on Monday, witnesses said.

Hundreds of officers from the defense ministry's media arm, known as the Department of Moral Guidance, staged a sit-in outside their Sanaa headquarters, calling for General Ali al-Shater, who has headed the department since 1978, to be fired over corruption, witnesses said.

An Iraqi Shiite militia group behind the kidnap of a British consultant and his four bodyguards, and blamed for the killing of U.S. troops, said on Monday it would join the political process.

Qais al-Khazali, leader of Asaib Ahel al-Haq or League of the Righteous, said the departure of American forces a week ago meant violent "resistance" was no longer required.

Algeria has named retired general Athman Tartag to head up the country's fight against armed extremists, the daily El Watan reported Monday.

Tartag, who is also known as General Bachir, is in his 60s and has previously run the country's internal security service, the DSI, on an interim basis after the death of its chief in 2007.

Heavy gunfire killed more than 30 people in Syria's besieged city of Homs on Monday as newly arriving Arab League observers were urged to head immediately to one of the country's most serious hot spots.

Media reports said an initial group of 50 observers arrived in Syria Monday evening to oversee a deal aimed at ending a bloody crackdown on anti-regime dissent, while other reports said the monitors' arrival was yet to be confirmed.

Canada is concerned that forces worse than deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak could rise to power in a newly democratic Egypt, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in an interview.

"There are obviously forces who want democracy and progressive change (in Egypt), but there are clearly some forces that would want something that's probably worse than what we had before," he said in a taped interview with CTV News to be aired Monday.

A suicide attacker in a vehicle packed with explosives killed at least five people at the interior ministry in Baghdad on Monday as a worsening political standoff stoked sectarian tensions.

The blast, which left dozens wounded, came just days after the capital was struck by its deadliest violence in more than four months and as U.S. Vice President Joe Biden urged dialogue between Iraqi politicians to resolve their differences.

Israeli soldiers detained five Palestinians trying to infiltrate the Jewish state from the Gaza Strip on Sunday, an Israeli military spokeswoman said.

"This evening the soldiers spotted and arrested three Palestinians who were trying to cross the security barrier separating Israel from the central part of the Gaza Strip" controlled by the Hamas movement, she told Agence France Presse.

Gunmen shot dead an intelligence chief on Sunday in the port of Aden in south Yemen, a police official said, blaming the attack on al-Qaida.

The assailants intercepted the vehicle carrying Colonel Hussein Shabibi, head of internal security in the city's Sheikh Othman district, and shot him dead before making good their escape in a car, the official said.

Israel's defense ministry said on Sunday that the United States has agreed to provide it with an additional 235 million dollars to finance its rocket defense system.

"The aid from the American Congress is a supplementary step in the reinforcement of Israeli-American relations in the area of defense," Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a statement.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden urged leaders of Iraq's feuding political and sectarian factions Sunday to convene a "dialogue" to head off a worsening political crisis.

Biden, President Barack Obama's pointman on Iraq, has made a flurry of calls to Iraqi leaders this week, urging them to mend their fences after the Shiite president, Nouri al-Maliki, accused his Sunni vice president, Tareq al-Hashemi, of hiring bodyguards to run a death squad.