Shootings and bombings killed six Iraqi security forces members and an academic on Wednesday, while an inmate detonated explosives in a Baghdad prison in an attempted suicide attack, officials said.

Gunmen killed four police near Fallujah, west of Baghdad, a police captain and a medical source said, while gunmen in Mahmudiyah, south of the capital, shot intelligence service Captain Muntasser Abdul Rizzaq, according to an interior ministry official.

Egypt's referendum on a controversial draft constitution will now take place on two separate dates, Egyptian state television said on Wednesday.

The electoral commission announced that the vote, initially set only for December 15, will take place both on Saturday and a week later on December 22, Nile TV said.

Vandals sprayed anti-Christian graffiti on a monastery and a Christian cemetery in Jerusalem overnight, in two apparent "price-tag" attacks, police told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

"Overnight, graffiti was sprayed on the gates of the entrance of the Armenian cemetery reading 'Jesus is a son of a bitch' in Hebrew, and on a monastery belonging to the Greek Orthodox saying the same thing," police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

President Barack Obama proclaimed Syria's newly reframed opposition as the "legitimate" representative of the nation's people Tuesday, in the most significant U.S. intervention in a brutal civil war.

As Washington cranked up pressure on beleaguered President Bashar Assad, the Obama administration also blacklisted the al-Qaida-linked Al-Nusra Front, which officials here fear seeks to hijack the revolution, as a terrorist group.

The Friends of Syria nations opposed to President Bashar Assad meet in Morocco on Wednesday to look afresh at how to resolve the deepening crisis and support the new opposition group after it won official U.S. backing.

The meeting in Marrakesh coincides with a rapidly deteriorating refugee situation as winter sets in, and gains in the battlefield by a key rebel group suspected of links to al-Qaida.

The United States warned Tuesday there must be no return to the "bad old days" of the Mubarak era in Egypt, as the army there called for talks to resolve a crisis over a constitutional referendum.

"We continue to have deep concerns about the situation in Egypt," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah issued a decree Tuesday naming a new cabinet that retained the oil minister and brought back the finance minister who was ousted by the opposition.

The 16-member cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Mubarak al-Sabah, came after snap polls that were boycotted by the opposition in protest over an amendment of the electoral law of oil-rich Kuwait.

Iran has arrested 28 people, some with links to the Bahai faith, on charges of working with "anti-revolutionary" satellite channels, Tehran's prosecutor said on Tuesday.

"Twenty-eight people were arrested across Tehran last night for cooperating with anti-revolutionary networks," Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said in remarks reported by the ISNA news agency.

Scores of civilians from President Bashar Assad's minority sect were reported killed Tuesday as Washington blacklisted an al-Qaida-linked rebel group it accuses of hijacking the uprising in Syria.

Bomb attacks in the village of Aqrab in the central province of Hama killed or wounded at least 125 civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which could not immediately give a breakdown of the casualties.

Egypt's powerful army called for President Mohamed Morsi and the secular opposition to meet to resolve a deepening crisis over a constitutional referendum as the rival camps organized mass protests Tuesday.

General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the country's armed forces chief and defense minister, made the appeal "for the sake of Egypt" to all political groups and movements to meet on Wednesday at a Cairo military sports complex, according to a statement posted on the military's official Facebook page.