Syrian forces seemed to be directly targeting journalists in Homs, wounded French reporter Edith Bouvier and photographer William Daniels said Saturday, after escaping the besieged city.

"There were at least five successive explosions, very near. We really had the impression that we were directly targeted," the Figaro daily quoted the pair as saying after their return to Paris Friday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday said Syrian authorities will "be called to account for their crimes before international criminal jurisdictions," as two French journalists evacuated from Syria's battered city Homs arrived at a military airport near Paris after escaping the besieged protest hub where two of their colleagues were killed.

Sarkozy, who announced earlier on Friday that Paris would close its embassy in Syria to denounce President Bashar al-Assad's "scandalous" repression, paid homage to the journalists on their arrival.

Al-Qaida is moving from Iraq to Syria, where the government is carrying out a bloody crackdown on an uprising, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in an interview published on Friday.

"Al-Qaida has started migrating from Iraq to Syria, and maybe it will migrate from Syria to another country, to Libya or to Egypt or to any region where the regime is unstable and out of control," Maliki said in an interview with Saudi daily Okaz.

The Syrian regime may have won the battle of Baba Amr against lightly armed rebels, but spreading protests indicate this victory on the ground is unlikely to clear the country's political impasse, analysts said on Friday.

The small district in the central city of Homs had become a symbol of the almost year-long uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Friday demanded that Syria unconditionally let in humanitarian aid and said the government was "afraid" to let in the U.N. emergency aid chief into the country, as an aid convoy was denied access to the battered Baba Amr district of Homs.

"The Syrian authorities must open without any preconditions to humanitarian communities," Ban said.

Paris prosecutors on Friday opened a preliminary murder probe into an attack on a media center in Syria's Homs in which a French photographer was killed and a French journalist wounded.

The February 22 rocket attack in Homs' Baba Amr district killed French photographer Remi Ochlik as well as veteran Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, and wounded Le Figaro reporter Edith Bouvier of France and British photographer Paul Conroy.

U.S. President Barack Obama warned a premature attack on Iran would allow it to play the "victim" in the nuclear crisis, noting that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's "days are numbered," in remarks published Friday days before he meets Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

In some of his toughest comments yet on Tehran's nuclear drive, Obama also warned Israel and Iran should take seriously possible U.S. action against Iranian nuclear facilities if sanctions fail to stop the country's atomic ambitions.

President Michel Suleiman noted on Friday that Lebanon is witnessing a period of stability despite the unrest in the region, hoping that any action regarding oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean would not take place against the country’s interests.

He said: “Any violation of our petroleum rights will lead to war.”

Thousands of Iraqis demonstrated against Syrian President Bashar Assad in a protest on Friday in the mostly Sunni town of Heet, condemning a bloody crackdown by his regime.

The protesters, who gathered outside al-Faruq mosque in the center of the western town, shouted slogans describing the Syrian leader as a "coward" and "the enemy of God," and called for violent resistance against his rule.

France will close its embassy in Syria to denounce the "scandalous" repression by President Bashar Assad's regime, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday at the close of an EU summit.

French Foreign Minister "Alain Juppe and I have decided to close our embassy in Syria," Sarkozy told a news conference.