Kurdish rebels stormed a Turkish army post on the Iraq border Sunday, triggering fighting that killed 22 people in the latest clash since Ankara launched a major offensive against the outlawed PKK.

Six soldiers, two village guards and 14 Kurdish rebels were killed following the assault on an army post in a village in the southeastern province of Hakkari, the local governor told the Anatolia news agency.

Hundreds of people rallied in Australia on Sunday in support of the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad, urging no intervention by foreign powers in the conflict.

Organized by a group calling itself "Hands off Syria", the demonstration began with a short rally of several hundred people at Sydney's town hall but numbers swelled as the group, many of them families, marched through the city.

Syrian regime warplanes pounded rebel positions in second city Aleppo on Sunday ahead of a threatened ground assault by more than 20,000 troops assembled around the commercial capital.

A high-level security official said Syria's army completed its deployment of reinforcements to the northern city of Aleppo, ready for a decisive showdown.

Iran has reached out to Turkey and Qatar to ask for their help in freeing 48 Iranian pilgrims being held in Syria after kidnappers stormed their bus in Damascus, state media reported on Sunday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi telephoned his Turkish and Qatari counterparts, Ahmet Davutoglu and Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir Al-Thani, late Saturday to request their assistance, the state television website reported.

A suicide bombing Yemeni authorities blamed on Al-Qaida killed 42 people in a southern town recently recaptured by the army from the jihadists, hospital and local government sources said on Sunday.

In the east of the country, meanwhile, a suspected U.S. drone strike late on Saturday killed five Al-Qaida militants, a local official said.

Israeli soldiers shot and wounded a Syrian man trying to breach a frontier fence in the southern Golan with a pair of wire cutters on Saturday, a military spokeswoman said.

Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich said Israeli forces "identified a civilian from Syria, a man approaching the border fence. The man was holding hydraulic cutters and tried to cut the fence.

The Syrian army now has the whole of the capital under its control, a brigadier-general on Saturday told journalists visiting the neighborhood of Tadamun, the scene of heavy fighting earlier.

"We have cleansed all the districts of Damascus, from Al-Midan to Mazzeh, from Al-Hajar Al-Aswad to Qadam... to Tadamun," said the general who led the military operation in Tadamun, refusing to give his name.

Local elections are to be held in Algeria on November 29, Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia announced on Saturday, quoted by Algerian radio.

"The local elections will take place on November 29" for 1,541 municipal councils and 48 general (wilaya) councils, Kablia said at a forum in Algiers organized by Liberte newspaper.

Egypt's foreign ministry Saturday denounced attacks against Myanmar's Muslim minority, saying its envoy in the Buddhist-majority East Asian country had seen extensive damage caused by sectarian clashes.

The ministry statement came a day after protesters in Cairo burnt the flag of Myanmar's mission.

Arab states will not accept a new international envoy to Syria after Kofi Annan's resignation unless his or her mandate is to clearly negotiate a transfer of power, Qatar's prime minister said on Saturday.

"Arab nations will not accept a new envoy with the same mandate that was given to Annan," Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani told Al-Jazeera of the outgoing U.N. and Arab League envoy, whose six-point plan for peace was never implemented.