Attacks in Iraq on Friday killed five people, including two anti-Qaida militiamen, officials said, the latest in an apparent spike in violence less than a month ahead of provincial elections.

In the deadliest attack, gunmen killed Hussein Musleh and two of his sons near their home in the village of Al-Jumhuriyah in Salaheddin province, north of Baghdad.

Armed Bedouin tribesmen in Egypt's Sinai peninsula abducted on Friday two tourists, an Israeli man and a Norwegian woman, as they traveled between two beach resorts, police said.

Six gunmen intercepted the tourists' car and forced them into their truck, the officials said. The pair had been traveling between the southern resort of Taba, on the border with Israel, and Dahab.

Syria's key regional ally Iran on Friday condemned a suicide mosque bombing in Damascus that killed the country's top Sunni Muslim cleric and at least 40 other people, Fars news agency reported.

"The foreign ministry condemns the martyrdom of Sheikh Mohamed Saeed al-Bouti, who was killed while in the company of his pupils by the savage action of extremist groups," the ministry was quoted as saying.

Syria's President Bashar Assad on Friday condemned a deadly attack on a mosque that killed more than 40 people including a top pro-regime cleric, vowing that Syria would be "cleansed" of extremism.

"I present my condolences to the Syrian people for the martyrdom of Sheikh Mohamed Saeed al-Bouti, a great figure in Syria and the Islamic world," he said in a statement issued by the presidency overnight.

Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members gathered behind police lines outside their Cairo headquarters on Friday in anticipation of an opposition march, a week after activists clashed with the Islamists.

The Brotherhood bussed in hundreds of supporters to stand guard outside its offices ahead of the opposition protest, set to begin after noon on Friday.

Egyptian villagers lynched a suspected car thief on Thursday, security sources said, in the latest in a spate of such vigilante killings in the face of growing lawlessness.

The lynching, in the Nile Delta village of Ezbat al-Gindy, came days after residents of another village strung up two suspected criminals in an incident described by the justice minister as a sign of the "death of the state".

Human Rights Watch on Thursday urged U.S. President Barack Obama on the eve of his Jordan visit to press King Abdullah II to accept Palestinian refugees and other asylum seekers at the Syrian border.

"Jordan is routinely and unlawfully rejecting Palestinian refugees, single males, and undocumented people seeking asylum at its border with Syria," HRW and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic said in a statement.

The Chaldean Catholic bishop of Aleppo, Antoine Audo, said on Thursday that up to 30,000 Christians have fled the Syrian city and spoke of his concern about two priests kidnapped weeks ago.

Audo, who was in Rome as a representative of the Caritas-Syria charity for a meeting of regional humanitarian organizations, told Agence France Presse that the situation in the war-ravaged city was "painful".

Egypt has granted the Muslim Brotherhood non-governmental organization status, a minister said on Thursday, a day after judges said the Islamist movement had no legal standing.

The once banned movement, now in power, has come under increased scrutiny by the opposition and the largely hostile media, who say it is a secretive group with too much influence over President Mohamed Morsi, a former Brotherhood leader.

A suicide bomb attack on a mosque in central Damascus on Thursday killed 42 people, including a prominent pro-regime Sunni cleric and his grandson, and wounded 84 others, Syria's health ministry said as the opposition's chief condemned the bombing as a "crime".

"The number of those martyred in the terrorist suicide attack in the Iman Mosque rises to 42 martyrs with 84 injured," a bulletin on state television said, citing the ministry.