Bombings and a shooting against Iraqi security forces, a Shiite mosque and a local official killed six people and wounded dozens of others on Friday, security and medical officials said.

"Three policemen were killed and two others wounded by a bomb targeting their patrol in al-Muqdadiyah this morning," said a police lieutenant colonel in the town, which lies in restive Diyala province.

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said on Saturday he was "horrified" by the violence in Syria as he visited a desert refugee camp in neighboring Jordan.

"We are tremendously horrified to learn of this experience that so many people here face, the horrifying experiences that cause them to leave," their country, Baird said during a tour of the Zaatari refugee camp outside the northern Jordanian city of Mafraq.

French President Francois Hollande said France was committed to finding a political solution to the Syrian conflict as he paid tribute Saturday to the 88th French soldier killed in Afghanistan.

He noted that France had deployed a field hospital in Jordan "as close as possible to the border with Syria to help not only refugees but also combatants fighting the repression of a regime which is no longer motivated by anything but the fear of its own demise."

Rescue teams in northwest Iran were striving Sunday to dig survivors out of the rubble of twin strong earthquakes that leveled villages and killed at least 180 people and injured 1,300 others, according to an official toll.

The scale of the disaster was still emerging as rescue operations in the devastated zone northeast of the city of Tabriz pushed through the night after Saturday's quakes.

Turkey has been dealing with Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region as though it were an independent state, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in a statement released on Saturday.

Turkey is "dealing with the (Kurdistan) region as an independent state, and this is rejected by us," Maliki said in a soon-to-be broadcast interview with a Turkish television channel, according to the statement on his website.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Saturday that Syria must not become a haven for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels battling Turkey.

"We share Turkey's determination that Syria must not become a haven for PKK terrorists whether now or after the departure of the Assad regime," Clinton told a joint news conference in Istanbul with his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu.

Egypt has asked Gaza's Hamas rulers for information on three members of an Islamist group suspected of involvement in a deadly attack on a military outpost, a senior security official said on Saturday.

He said Egyptian authorities had received a list of nine suspects from Israel, and asked the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas to provide information on three of the men.

Arab ministers are to meet in Saudi Arabia Sunday to mull their next moves on the Syrian conflict after the resignation of U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan and who might succeed him, a top League official said.

The foreign ministers' meeting in the Red Sea city of Jeddah will discuss the "latest developments in Syria and what policy action to take" after Annan's announcement on August 2 that he was stepping down, the pan-Arab bloc's deputy secretary general Ahmed Ben Helli said.

French President Francois Hollande said France was committed to finding a political solution to the Syrian conflict as he paid tribute Saturday to the 88th French soldier killed in Afghanistan.

He noted that France had deployed a field hospital in Jordan "as close as possible to the border with Syria to help not only refugees but also combatants fighting the repression of a regime which is no longer motivated by anything but the fear of its own demise."

Yemeni militia have killed an al-Qaida prisoner who tried to escape but a local militant leader managed to flee as they found an explosives lab in a separate incident, a militia source said on Saturday.

In another development, two soldiers were killed and three wounded in an ambush, an official said.