An Iranian opposition organization said on Saturday it is ready to move another group of its Iraq-based members to a new site near Baghdad after a delay which has dragged on for several months.

"As a gesture of goodwill, the residents of Ashraf will commence the 6th convoy of 400 residents from Camp Ashraf to Camp Liberty on August 23," Maryam Rajavi, president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran which includes the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, said in a statement.

The departing U.N. observer mission chief on Saturday accused both Syrian army and rebel forces of failing to protect civilians, as activists report dozens of people killed daily.

"Both parties have obligations under international humanitarian law to make sure that civilians are protected," General Babacar Gaye, head of the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria, told reporters in Damascus.

Suspected Al-Qaida militants killed 14 soldiers in a rocket attack and suicide bombing on Saturday that targeted intelligence headquarters in the main southern city of Aden, a security official said.

"The death toll has increased to 14 soldiers," the official told AFP, adding that 11 were killed by gunfire and the other three by a "car bomb driven by suicide bomber into the courtyard of the intelligence building."

Militants wounded three Egyptian policemen in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday in an ambush of their vehicle with a rocket propelled grenade, a security official said.

The militants attacked the policemen near the north Sinai town of Sheikh Zuwayid, roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) west of the Gaza border, as the policemen were returning from an operation, the official said.

The European Union on Saturday pledged to support Lakhdar Brahimi as the new international mediator on the Syria conflict in his "immensely challenging task".

"Mr. Brahimi is an experienced diplomat with a deep understanding of the region," EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement, adding: "The EU will provide him with its full support in this immensely challenging task."

Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Shaara has not defected, state television said on Saturday, citing a statement from his office after media reports that he had fled.

"Mr. Sharaa has never thought about leaving the country or going anywhere," said the television. Sharaa himself was not seen.

Syrian forces launched new air strikes and shelled rebel strongholds in several key cities on Saturday, a watchdog said, after the U.N. named a new envoy to try to end the conflict.

The intensified fighting, particularly in and around the key northern hub of Aleppo, has sent thousands more Syrians fleeing into neighboring countries as the divided international community appears powerless to act.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon is "dismayed" by the latest anti-Israel comments made by Iranian leaders, a spokesman said Friday.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attack on Israel as being a "cancerous tumor" has already been condemned by the United States and France. Ahead of mass demonstrations in Tehran on Friday, supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel will "disappear".

Russia welcomed the new international envoy for the conflict in Syria and said it expected him build on the work of predecessor Kofi Annan, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Saturday.

"We proceed on the assumption that Lakhdar Brahimi will base his work on the platform of the existing 'road map' of a Syrian settlement -- Kofi Annan's peace plan and the final communique of the June ministerial meeting of the Action Group on Syria in Geneva and also on the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions," the ministry said.

Russia on Friday rejected a proposal to set up no-fly zones to help civilians flee fighting in Syria's border areas after the United States said it was ready to consider the move.

"You have to solve citizen security issues using methods put in practice by international humanitarian law," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Sky News Arabia in an interview to be aired in full on Saturday and released to Russian media.