Up to 33 police and five civilians were killed in fighting after Taliban crossed over from Pakistan and attacked a remote region in eastern Afghanistan, an official said Wednesday.

Nuristan provincial governor Jamaluddin Badr said about 40 rebels also died in the two days of clashes that followed weeks of tit-for-tat allegations of cross-border attacks that have fanned diplomatic tensions.

Baghdad and Tehran pledged on Wednesday to strengthen ties and put the past behind them, even as Washington accuses Iran of supplying new and more lethal weapons to anti-U.S. militias.

Iran and Iraq, which fought a 1980-1988 war that was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the past century, killing an estimated one million people, have drawn closer since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.

Libyan rebel leaders for the first time will hold talks with NATO's 28-nation North Atlantic Council on July 13 to present their plans for democratic transition, the organization’s chief said Wednesday.

Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the rebel forces were making progress in their battle against Moammar Gadhafi's troops while the Libyan leader's "plans to retake country by force have fallen apart."

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday launched several anti-ship missiles near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the country's Arabic-language television channel al-Alam reported.

The Guards fired two Khalij Fars (Persian Gulf) anti-ship missiles which Iran says are capable of Mach 3 speed and can hit targets at a distance of 300 kilometers.

Human Rights Watch on Wednesday accused Bahrain of carrying out a "campaign of violent oppression" against its citizens and called for an end to abuses.

Pro-reform protesters took to the streets of Bahrain on February 14, but security forces crushed the demonstrations a month later in a bloody crackdown followed by sweeping arrests.

Bahrain has sentenced one of its citizens and two foreigners to 10 years in prison for spying for Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Akhbar al-Khaleej newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Bahrain's high criminal court sentenced "three defendants to 10 years in prison for spying for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, one of them a Bahraini and two others" who worked as diplomats in Iran's embassy in Kuwait and were sentenced in absentia, the daily reported.

Yemen's oil-rich Gulf neighbors are engaged in "intensive consultations" to resolve the long-running political crisis in Sanaa, Oman's foreign minister Yussef bin Alawi bin Abdullah said.

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) "continue to conduct intensive consultations with parties in Yemen to overcome the crisis," Abdullah told Agence France Presse late on Tuesday.

Libyan rebels backed by NATO air power on Wednesday launched a promised assault on a key gateway to Tripoli, attacking positions just 50 kilometers from the capital.

Buoyed by French arms drops and NATO-led air strikes, the rebels attacked positions in the Gualish area, in the plains north of their enclave in the Nafusa Mountains southwest of Tripoli, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

Syrian troops killed at least 22 people in a crackdown they launched in the flashpoint central city of Hama on Tuesday, a human rights group said.

"At least 22 people were killed in Hama and more than 80 wounded some of them seriously," Ammar Qurabi of the National Organization for Human Rights said on Wednesday.

Amnesty International on Wednesday accused the Syrian regime of committing crimes against humanity during a deadly crackdown over a pro-democracy protest in a border town.

The London-based rights group urged the United Nations to take action over the assault by the security forces and army on Tall Kalakh in May, amid the protests against President Bashar Assad's rule that have swept the country.