German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle arrived Saturday in Yemen for a brief visit to discuss bilateral cooperation with the country's new president, Saba news agency said.

Westerwelle will hold talks with President Abdrabuh Mansour Hadi on "fields of bilateral cooperation," the state news agency said.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe implicitly slammed Russia's stance on a draft U.N. resolution on Syria on Saturday, saying there were no grounds to demand a simultaneous halt to violence.

"Currently any possibility of reaching an agreement over a Security Council accord is blocked," Juppe, who will be in New York on Monday to discuss the draft, said at the close of EU foreign ministers' talks in the Danish capital.

Arab and Russian foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Saturday called for an end to the violence in Syria "whatever its source," as they struggled try to find common ground on ways to resolve the deadly conflict.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters after a meeting at the Arab League headquarters that he and his Arab counterparts want "an end to the violence whatever its source."

Algeria's opposition Rally for Culture and Democracy elected its spokesman Mohcine Belabbas as its new leader Saturday at a conference in the capital.

Founder-member Said Sadi, 65, had announced on Friday that he was standing down from the leadership "to make way for young people".

Syrian troops stormed the rebel stronghold of Idlib on Saturday after shelling the city for several days, confirming fears of an assault after another rebel redoubt was overrun last week, monitors said.

The attack came as peace envoy Kofi Annan was in Damascus seeking an end to a year-long crackdown on dissent that has cost an estimated more than 8,500 lives, holding "positive" talks with President Bashar Assad.

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal on Saturday told his Arab and Russian counterparts that a Russian-Chinese veto of a U.N. resolution condemning Syria allowed the regime's "brutality" to continue.

The stand of "the countries that thwarted the U.N. Security Council resolution and voted against the resolution of the General Assembly on Syria gave the Syrian regime a license to extend its brutal practices against the Syrian people, without compassion or mercy," he said.

Arab and Russian foreign ministers met in Cairo on Saturday over Syria, amid splits over how to move forward to resolve a crisis that has left thousands dead in a year.

The meetings come as the West and the Arab world pile pressure on President Bashar Assad's regime to end a year-old uprising spiraling into all-out civil war.

Russia on Saturday said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made clear to the U.N.-Arab League envoy for Syria Kofi Annan that Moscow is opposed to "crude interference" from the outside into Syrian internal affairs.

"A particular emphasis was placed on the inadmissibility of trampling on international legal norms, including through crude interference in Syria's internal affairs," the foreign ministry said after a meeting earlier between Lavrov and Annan in Cairo.

A Bahraini youth died on Saturday of a police gunshot wound sustained at the start of the month, the Gulf state's main Shiite opposition group Wefaq said.

Condemning state "repression of demonstrations calling for political reforms," it said Saida Fadhel Mirza al-Obeidi, 22, was struck in the head on March 1 in Diraz, a village east of Manama.

International envoy Kofi Annan expressed "grave concern" to Syria's President Bashar Assad over the deadly crackdown on protests in talks Saturday, the United Nations said.

The former U.N. secretary general "put several proposals on the table regarding stopping the violence and the killing, access for humanitarian agencies and the ICRC, release of detainees, and the start of an inclusive political dialogue," said a U.N. statement.