Syria’s first lady Asma Assad told a friend that she was the “real dictator” in the family, according to leaked emails, Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported Monday.

Her correspondence with President Bashar Assad, his aides, friends and family portray her as highly supportive of her husband, the daily added.

Israel is using the Gaza Strip as a testing ground for a possible military strike on its arch foe Iran, the head of the radical Palestinian movement Hamas said on Monday.

"Israel is warming up the region for a possible war against Iran," Khaled Meshaal said in an interview with Turkey's Anatolia news agency.

Three "terrorists" and a member of Syria's security forces were killed in a clash in a district of Damascus on Monday, state television said.

"Three terrorists were killed and a fourth was arrested in the fighting between security forces and an armed terrorist gang sheltered in a house of a residential district," it said.

Libya's interim authorities now control all ports of entry to the country's third city of Misrata, a government official said on Sunday.

"All the ports were handed over," including the airport, said Ziyad Abdelali of the interior ministry.

Technical experts from the U.N. and Organization of Islamic Cooperation are in Syria on a mission to assess the humanitarian impact of its year-long bloodshed, a senior OIC official said on Sunday.

"The joint OIC-U.N. mission entered Syria on Friday to carry out an evaluation of humanitarian aid," on a mission led by the Syrian government, its assistant secretary general, Atta al-Mannan Bakhit, told Agence France Presse.

Bahraini security forces clashed with youths on Sunday after the funeral of a protester who allegedly died after inhaling tear gas fired by riot police, witnesses said.

The clashes erupted in the Shiite village of Al-Muqsha, north of the capital Manama, following the funeral of Jaafer Jassem Ridha, 41.

Egyptian Bedouin in the Sinai kidnapped two Brazilian women tourists on Sunday in the third such abduction in the peninsula this year, security officials said.

The tourists were returning from a visit to the historic monastery of St Catherine in southern Sinai when the tribesmen seized them and an Egyptian tour guide, the officials said.

The president of the International Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, is headed to Moscow for talks on the humanitarian situation in Syria, the ICRC said Sunday.

"Mr. Kellenberger will pay a one-day visit during which he will meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov" on Monday, the International Committee for the Red Cross said in a statement.

Iraq moved on Sunday to diversify its oil export routes to reduce the impact of a potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran on Baghdad's oil-dependent income, as well as the world economy.

The plans, recommended by the cabinet's energy and economics committees, include efforts to ramp up exports along a pipeline to Turkey, increase the amount of oil transported by road, and "urgently" fix disused transport pipelines, according to a statement from government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh.

A Syrian rights group said on Sunday it had filed a war crimes complaint with French authorities against former Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass who was reported this week to be in Paris.

The Syrian Association for Freedom provided AFP with a copy of the complaint it had filed with Paris prosecutors on Friday accusing Tlass of responsibility in "several war crimes including the massacre in the city of Hama in 1982."