The Iraqi authorities on Monday called for an end to what a senior official said were illegal and illegitimate protest rallies in Sunni-majority provinces that have cut key trade routes.

The remarks released by the office of Ali al-Alaak, cabinet secretary general, came as protests blocking a key highway linking Iraq to Syria and Jordan entered a ninth day and authorities north of Baghdad declared general strikes.

Syria's government on Monday welcomed any initiative for talks to end bloodshed in the country, after U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said he had a peace plan acceptable to world powers.

The regime's stand, expressed by Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi, came amid a flurry of diplomacy led by Brahimi to find ways to end the 21-month conflict.

Thirty tortured and disfigured bodies have been found in the northern Damascus neighborhood of Barzeh, the scene of regular clashes between regime troops and rebels, a watchdog said on Monday.

"Thirty bodies were found in the Barzeh district. They bore signs of torture and have so far not been identified," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on medics and activists on the ground in compiling its tolls.

A wave of bombings and shootings across Iraq killed 23 people on Monday as the country grappled with anti-government rallies and simmering political crises ahead of major Shiite commemoration rituals.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks in more than a dozen towns and cities that wounded 83 people, but Sunni militants such as al-Qaida's front group in Iraq regularly target officials and security forces in a bid to destabilize the government, and also often attack Shiite pilgrims.

An improvised bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the public prosecutor in the Libyan city of Benghazi causing material damage but no fatalities, a security source said Monday.

"Initial evidence suggests the device was a suitcase packed with high yield explosives (TNT)," an investigator at the scene told Agence France Presse, adding that there were no casualties.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Syrian refugees on Sunday that victory over the "tyrant" President Bashar Assad was at hand.

"I can see it clearly that the help of God is near," Erdogan said in televised remarks at Turkey's Akcakale refugee camp in the southeastern city of Sanliurfa.

President Shimon Peres on Sunday urged Israel to resume peace talks with the Palestinians, saying their president Mahmoud Abbas was a willing partner with whom an agreement could be reached.

Speaking with Israeli diplomats at his Jerusalem residence, Peres said the only way the Jewish state could positively affect the fluctuating reality in the region was "to complete the peace agreement with the Palestinians."

An explosion rocked a Coptic church near the Libyan city of Misrata, killing two people and wounding two, all of them Egyptians, a diplomat told Agence France Presse on Sunday.

"Two men were killed and two others wounded," said the diplomat at the Egyptian embassy in Tripoli who declined to be named, adding that it took place late Saturday but the embassy was only informed on Sunday.

Tunisian police raided a working class suburb of the capital in a hunt for suspected Salafist arms caches on Sunday, sparking a firefight in which a woman was killed, the interior ministry said.

Police came under Kalashnikov fire in the Douar Hicher neighborhood, northwest of Tunis, and fired back, seriously wounding the gunman and killing his wife, ministry spokesman Khaled Tarrouche told Agence France Presse.

A Russian warship carrying a marines unit has left its Black Sea port for Syria amid preparations for a possible evacuation of nationals living and working in the strife-torn country, news reports said Sunday.

The Novocherkassk landing ship is the third such craft dispatched since Friday to the Tartus port that Russia leases from its last Middle East ally, agencies cited an unnamed official in the general staff as saying.