Russia's U.N. Security Council veto is "just an excuse" for world powers not to intervene in Syria, but the regime is going to fall without their help, the chief of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood told AFP Thursday.

"Russia is just an excuse for the rest of the great powers not to topple (Syrian President Bashar Assad's) regime," said Mohammed Riyad al-Shaqfa, complaining of an international unwillingness to "get sucked into" the conflict in Syria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday world powers should draw lessons from their mistakes and stop interfering in crisis-hit nations of North Africa and the Middle East.

Putin did not address the raging conflict in Syria directly and appeared to be referring to the overall threat of the use of force that has also been applied by Israel and the United States to Iran over its nuclear program.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told the U.N. Security Council on Monday that the Syrian civil war is worsening and the country faces a growing food crisis, envoys said.

Brahimi told the 15-nation council that the Syrian government estimates there are 5,000 foreign fighters in the country and is increasingly portraying the conflict as a "foreign conspiracy," envoys at the closed meeting told AFP.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an interview published Monday he did not see any progress on his country's nuclear standoff with the West before the U.S. presidential election in November.

"Experience has shown that important and key decisions are not made in the U.S. leading up to national elections," Ahmadinejad said in an interview with the Washington Post newspaper.

An Israeli war on Iran "will eventually happen" but the Jewish state will be destroyed as a result, the head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday, according to reports.

"War will happen but it is not certain where and when," General Mohammed Ali Jaafari said, according to the ISNA and Fars news agencies.

The U.N. and Arab League leaders on Friday discussed deadlocked efforts to end the Syria war and unrest sweeping the Muslim world over a film mocking Islam, a spokesman said.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon held talks with his Arab League counterpart Nabil al-Arabi ahead of the U.N. General Assembly next week when Syria is expected to dominate speeches by world leaders.

North Korea on Thursday lashed out at a U.S. plan to build a new radar base in Japan, saying it would escalate an arms race and leave Pyongyang no option but to develop "more powerful nuclear weapons".

During a visit to Tokyo on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said an agreement had been reached on deploying another U.S. missile defense radar in Japan.

The international peace envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi on Tuesday met Syrians staying at a Turkish refugee camp in his first encounter since taking over the mission from his frustrated predecessor.

The U.N.-Arab League envoy met representatives of some 1,300 Syrians at Altinozu camp in Hatay city, located on the border with their violence-racked homeland.

Explosive blasts cut power lines to Iran's underground nuclear facility at Fordo last month, the head of Iran's atomic agency said at a meeting of U.N. atomic watchdog member states Monday.

"On ... 17th August 2012, the electric power lines from the city of Qom to the Fordo complex ... were cut using explosives," Fereydoon Abbasi Davani told the 155-nation International Atomic Energy Agency gathering in a speech.

Serious human rights violations have soared dramatically in Syria, a top U.N. investigator said Monday, calling for "appropriate action" against perpetrators of atrocities in the war-torn country.

"Gross violations of human rights have grown in number, in pace and in scale," Paulo Sergio Pinheiro told diplomats gathered in Geneva, as more violence shook Damascus and Syria's second city Aleppo.