Syria's foreign minister told Moscow Tuesday Damascus has started withdrawing troops in line with Kofi Annan's peace plan but Russia said the regime should implement the initiative more decisively.

The rare visit by the veteran Foreign Minister Walid Muallem to Moscow coincided with a deadline under the Annan plan for Syria to withdraw forces from protest cities amid Western worries the scheme is in tatters.

Syrian regime forces killed Tuesday 11 people, including seven civilians, in shelling and attacks on the day the government is expected to pull out troops from protest hubs as per a U.N.-Arab League peace plan, a monitoring group said.

Six civilians were killed in shelling that hit the old district of Khaldiyeh, in Homs, and another was shot dead in the neighborhood of Bab Tadmur, also in the central city, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Shots fired from Syria at a Syrian refugee camp inside Turkey are a "clear violation" of the common border between the two countries, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday.

"It was a very clear violation of the border," Erdogan told reporters in Beijing, where he is on an official visit. "Obviously we will take the necessary measures," he was quoted as saying by the Turkish news agency Anatolia.

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has shown no sign so far that his government is sticking by a peace plan to end the fighting in Syria just hours before a U.N. deadline, the White House said Monday.

"We certainly have seen no sign yet of the Assad regime abiding by its commitments," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

Riot police on Monday fired tear gas and baton-charged protesters in central Tunis who defied a ban on demonstrations, in some of the worst violence in the city in months.

As hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets, the head of the Ennahda Islamist party which dominates parliament called on Tunisians to "be patient" and give the new government a chance to bring in reforms.

A peace plan for Syria was in jeopardy on Monday as deadly fresh clashes raged after President Bashar al-Assad's government laid down conditions for it to pull troops and armor out of protest hubs.

Security forces killed 151 people across the country, among them more than 30 women and children and four rebels, the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said.

The United Nations Development Program on Monday transferred four electrical transformers to Gaza in a bid to upgrade the territory's struggling sole power plant.

The UNDP, in a statement from its Gaza office, said it brought four transformers and other electrical equipment into the territory as part of a project valued at $3.3 million dollars.

U.S. and Libyan authorities are probing oil giants including Italy's Eni SpA and Total SA of France for their past ties to the fallen regime of Moammar Gadhafi, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

The Libyan general prosecutor's office is investigating "Libyan and foreign operators in Libya" for possible "financial irregularities," the office's deputy chief Abdelmajeed Saad told the Journal.

A Bahraini court on Monday jailed 10 Shiites for marching on the capital's former Pearl Square, the focal point of a month-long uprising crushed last year, a judicial source said.

They were arrested in February during protests marking the first anniversary of the month-long Shiite-led uprising against the Sunni monarchy which was crushed by force in mid-March 2011.

Bahrain's interior ministry said on Monday that jailed activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who has been on a hunger strike for two months, is in "good health" after his lawyer expressed fears he could be dead.

"Abdel Hadi al-Khawaja's state of health is good," the interior ministry said in a statement, adding that the activist had been transferred to a military hospital "for the best medical treatment."