Clashes between armed civilians and al-Qaida militants trying to retake control of the town of Loder spread on Friday to nearby Mudia, as the death toll from four days of clashes reached 200, local sources said.

At least 23 people, 20 of them suspected militants, were killed in one suburb of the southern town, tribal sources said.

Syria must allow humanitarian access to aid those in need after 13 months of deadly violence, a spokesman for international peace mediator Kofi Annan said on Friday.

"Mr. Annan is aware that we don't have a perfect situation in the country at the moment," his spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said on day two of a shaky ceasefire introduced under a peace plan drawn up by Annan, the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria.

Around 1,500 people, mostly opposition Islamists, demonstrated in the center of Jordan's capital on Friday to reject a proposed electoral law, saying it "rigs people's will."

"The people reject martial laws. We demand a modern and democratic elections law," read a banner carried by demonstrators, including trade unionists and political party members, as they marched from Al-Husseni mosque to nearby city hall.

International aid for Syrians fleeing President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown has begun to arrive in Turkey, its foreign minister said Friday amid concern over growing refugee numbers.

"We will start getting international aid, and in fact we have already started," after swelling numbers of refugees who turned up at Turkish-Syrian border, Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters in Istanbul.

Thousands of Islamists demonstrated in Egypt on Friday to demand that members of ousted president Hosni Mubarak's regime be barred from standing in next month's presidential election.

They gathered in an upbeat mood in the capital's iconic Tahrir Square, symbol of the popular protest movement that led to last year's downfall of Mubarak, amid chants of "No to leftovers from the old regime!"

Foreign ministers of the six Gulf monarchies are to hold a special meeting in Riyadh after Iran's president visited an island in the Gulf claimed by the United Arab Emirates, a UAE official said on Friday.

Wednesday's Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) meeting in the Saudi capital comes at the request of the UAE, which recalled its envoy to Tehran on Thursday after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went to the disputed island of Abu Musa, the official said.

Russia will keep a permanent naval presence off Syria's coast to match the growing number of Western warships monitoring the 13-month crisis, a top defense official said on Friday.

"A decision has been taken to keep Russian navy ships permanently stationed near Syria's coast," the RIA Novosti state news agency quoted a senior defense ministry official as saying.

Al-Qaida front organization, the Islamic State of Iraq, said on Friday that it carried out a jail breakout in which 19 prisoners escaped in late March, in a statement on jihadists sites on Friday.

The group said that its members were able "to drug the guards responsible for monitoring the prisoners at night... and then open a hole in the wall of one of the cells".

Thousands of Syrians marched on Friday to test the regime's commitment to a U.N.-backed peace plan, and the fragile two-day old ceasefire was again shaken when security forces killed 10 civilians and an army deserter.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said security forces killed three protesters in Daraa, two protesters in Hama, two people in Idlib, two protesters in Aleppo, a demonstrator in the Damascus suburb of Daraya and a rebel soldier in al-Hassakeh.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday that he did not believe in the sincerity of Syrian leader Bashar Assad, nor in the U.N.-backed ceasefire aimed at halting 13 months of bloodshed.

"I do not believe in Bashar Assad's sincerity, nor unfortunately in the ceasefire. I think... we must absolutely deploy observers so that at the very least we know what is happening," he told French television I-Tele.