Dozens of Syrians gathered in the capital Damascus on Tuesday for a rare demonstration in support of Turkish protests against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"Erdogan leave," the demonstrators chanted, waving Syrian flags and pictures of President Bashar Assad in front of the Turkish embassy in Damascus.

A young Italian who was under investigation in Italy for terrorist recruitment has been killed fighting alongside rebels in Syria, according to Italian media reports on Tuesday.

Giuliano Ibrahim Delnevo, a 23- or 24-year-old from Genoa in northern Italy, was identified thanks to an Italian passport recovered from his body, the reports said.

An Egyptian court on Tuesday ended the detention of Hosni Mubarak in one corruption case, judicial sources told Agence France Presse, but the ousted president will remain in custody on other charges.

The North Cairo misdemeanor court ordered Mubarak's release but said it will continue to investigate accusations that he and his family acquired wealth illegally, the sources said.

Suspected Jewish extremists punctured the tires of 28 cars and scrawled graffiti in an Arab Israeli town before dawn on Tuesday in the latest in a spate of apparent hate crimes, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

On a wall near the vandalized cars in Abu Ghosh, west of Jerusalem, the perpetrators wrote in Hebrew: "Arabs out," and: "Racism or assimilation."

The U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, said Tuesday that much remained to be done to ensure progress at a proposed international conference on the Syrian conflict.

"I think that there is a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure that when Geneva takes place, it will produce something constructive," Brahimi said at a meeting for peace mediators in Losby in southeastern Norway.

G8 leaders on Tuesday strongly endorsed calls for a peace conference to be held in Geneva on the Syria conflict "as soon as possible".

At the end of a summit in Northern Ireland, the leaders also called for an agreement on a Syrian transitional government "formed by mutual consent", and said the military and security services "must be preserved and restored" in a future set-up.

Quitting power while his government battles a countrywide uprising would be a "national betrayal," Syria's President Bashar Assad has told a German newspaper in an interview.

"If I decided to leave office under these circumstances, it would be national betrayal. But it's another question if that's what the people want," he told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a Shiite Muslim religious hall in north Baghdad, killing at least 15 people, security officials said, the latest in a surge in nationwide violence.

The blasts took place shortly after midday prayers in the Habib ibn al-Mudhaher Hussainiyah in the capital's Qahira neighborhood, the interior ministry and police sources said.

Afghan government envoys are to travel to Qatar to try to open peace talks with the Taliban on a possible deal ending 12 years of conflict, President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday.

Karzai's announcement was a boost for the moribund peace process, which has made little ground despite mounting pressure as the withdrawal of 100,000 NATO troops from Afghanistan looms next year.

Senior leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas will meet on Tuesday in Ankara with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a diplomatic source told Agence France Presse.

The group's exiled leader Khaled Meshaal, along with Gaza's prime minister Ismail Haniya, will discuss Erdogan's planned visit to the Gaza Strip as well as the situation in Syria, the source said on condition of anonymity.