Iran on Thursday slammed a decision by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to suspend Syria's membership, calling the step against its key ally "unfair and unjust."

"Syria should have been invited to the summit to defend itself," Iran's foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi told the official IRNA news agency in the holy Muslim city of Mecca.

Turkish warplanes bombed areas of north Iraq in a bid to target rear bases of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) overnight into Thursday, a spokesman for the rebel group said.

"Turkish warplanes struck around midnight against several areas in the Kurdish Iraqi area," Haval Roz told Agence France Presse.

A wave of attacks across Iraq on Thursday killed at least 19 people, as an analyst warned of a potential escalation in violence to coincide with the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Officials reported more than 100 people were wounded in 15 explosions, including seven car bombs, a suicide attack, and a shooting, in nine cities and towns nationwide, a day after attacks left 13 people dead.

U.N. aid chief Valerie Amos said Thursday she was still pushing Damascus to allow international aid organizations to operate in Syria, warning that more than one million Syrians faced "destitution.”

"Over a million people have been uprooted and face destitution. Perhaps a million more have urgent humanitarian needs due to the widening impact of the crisis on the economy and people's livelihoods," she told reporters in Damascus.

About 15 Syrians have died in Turkish hospitals of their wounds from an air strike after 100 were sent across the border for treatment following the attack, a Turkish official said Thursday.

Many of those injured suffered severe burns in Wednesday's air strike by a Syrian air force MiG fighter jet in the town of Aazaz near Aleppo, which killed more than 30 people instantly and left more than 200 injured.

Israel on Thursday wound up nationwide testing of an SMS warning system against missile attack, sending texts to mobile phones in Jerusalem and other parts of the country, a military spokeswoman said.

The five-day exercise, which began on Sunday, took place to the backdrop of mounting speculation over a possible Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities and a resulting Iranian counter-attack.

With the West still refusing to arm Syria's opposition in the bloody fight against the regime, rebels in the flashpoint northern city of Aleppo warn that they could turn to Al-Qaida for help.

"We don't want Al-Qaida here, but if nobody else helps us, we will make an alliance with them," said Abu Ammar, a rebel commander in the central Bab al-Nasr district of Aleppo, scene of raging battles for almost a month.

A Syrian envoy in Beijing for talks with Chinese officials has praised her host's attitude to her country, contrasting it with that of Western powers, in comments published Thursday.

China has joined Russia to repeatedly use their vetoes to scuttle U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at tackling the conflict in Syria, putting them at loggerheads with fellow permanent members the United States, Britain and France.

The 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation suspended Syria in a meeting attended by its staunch ally Iran, in a move hailed early Thursday by the United States as one that sends "a strong message" to Damascus.

A statement issued at the end of an OIC summit in the Saudi holy city of Mecca said participants had agreed on "the need to end immediately the acts of violence in Syria and to suspend that country from the OIC."

A Syrian airstrike on a rebel bastion in the north Wednesday flattened a string of houses and killed 23 people including children, activists said, leaving residents wailing in grief and anger.

"Bashar did this. God help us, these animals will kill us all," said one man, hoisting a bloodied arm from a pile of body parts on the pavement outside the hospital in the town of Aazaz after the bombardment.