A group of armed Shiite Zaidi rebels on Sunday attacked the headquarters of Yemen's national security services in Sanaa, triggering clashes that left 10 people wounded, a security official said.

"Ten people have been wounded from both sides," the official said, adding that the local police responded when rebels attacked the headquarters with automatic weapons.

Syria's army prepared Sunday to launch an assault on Aleppo aimed at driving rebels out of the northern city and surrounding province, a security source told Agence France Presse.

The preparations came five days after the army and Hizbullah seized Qusayr in center-west Syria, a year after the strategic region had fallen into rebel hands.

Syrian rebels on Sunday opened fire on two Iraqi border posts along the southern edge of the two countries' frontier, killing one guard and wounding two others, officials said.

Iraqi border guards Colonel Nayif Zaili said Syrian rebels fired on two posts which lay two kilometers (1.25 miles) from the Al-Waleed border crossing linking the two countries.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken to Russia's Vladimir Putin after Moscow offered to bolster the beleaguered U.N. peacekeeping force monitoring the Israeli-Syrian ceasefire line on the Golan Heights, Netanyahu's office said Sunday.

"We discussed issues linked to Syria where the situation is becoming more complex by the day," Netanyahu said in remarks communicated by his office.

Some 180,000 illegal foreign workers have left Saudi Arabia since April 1 under an amnesty that allowed them to try to sort out their papers or leave without paying a penalty, a report said on Sunday.

"Between the beginning of April and the start of June, 180,000 foreigners left the kingdom for good," Okaz daily quoted Badr Malek, spokesman for the passports department, as saying.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned on Sunday that gains made by the regime in the Syrian conflict this week made it harder to organize a peace conference and to make it a success.

He said it was "worrying and depressing" that the so-called Geneva talks were not taking place this month, and repeated his warning that the world must do more to help the people of Syria.

Iraq's premier led a landmark cabinet meeting in the country's Kurdish region on Sunday to defuse tensions linked to a multitude of disputes that diplomats warn are among its biggest threats to stability.

The long-running rows have provoked sharp exchanges between the two sides, and while no tangible measures were agreed at the meeting, the mere fact that talks took place was seen as a positive sign.

A leading Iranian conservative clerical group has endorsed veteran diplomat Ali Akbar Velayati to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the June 14 presidential election, a media report said on Sunday.

The Mehr news agency said a majority of members of the Qom Seminary Scholars Association at a meeting on Saturday gave their support to Velayati, quoting group chief Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, a former conservative head of the judiciary.

A suicide car bomb targeting a Baghdad police station killed six people on Sunday, the latest in a string of bombings and attacks that have revived fears of all-out sectarian war in Iraq.

The blast, which struck during morning rush hour in the mostly-Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiyah, went off near a branch of the Istikbarat, a department of the police responsible for intelligence, according to security and medical officials.

Clashes in Libya's second city of Benghazi between former rebels and anti-militia demonstrators killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 100, the LANA news agency said on Sunday.

It cited a statement from Al-Jala hospital in the eastern city -- cradle of the revolution that toppled dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 -- as giving the new toll from Saturday's clashes, up from 28 dead.