Fresh protests against Iraq's premier in mostly Sunni cities on Wednesday closed off the main road to Syria and Jordan, with one speaker raising the prospect of taking up arms against the government.

Thousands of demonstrators attended rallies in Ramadi and Samarra, capitals of two Sunni-majority provinces in central and western Iraq, to rail against what they said was targeting of their community by officials and security forces from the Shiite-led government.

The Syrian deputy foreign minister, Faisal Muqdad, was headed for Moscow, an airport source in Beirut told AFP on Wednesday, amid reports of a U.S.-Russian initiative for a transition in Syria.

"Accompanied by foreign ministry official Ahmed Arnus, Muqdad's Aeroflot flight to Moscow took off from Beirut airport at midnight (2200 GMT)" Tuesday, the airport source said, on condition of anonymity.

At least 20 people including eight children were killed as Syrian army tanks blasted the northern village of Kahtaniyeh on Wednesday, a monitoring group said.

"At least 20 people, among them eight children and three women, were killed in shelling by regime forces of farmlands in Kahtaniyeh village, west of the city of Raqa," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Iran on Wednesday rejected as "baseless" allegations by Gulf Arab states that Tehran is interfering in their internal affairs, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"Shifting the regional states' responsibility in regards to their domestic problems is to escape realities on the ground," foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast was quoted as saying.

More than 45,000 people have been killed in Syria since the outbreak in March 2011 of an anti-regime revolt that became a bloody insurgency after a brutal crackdown on dissent, a watchdog said Wednesday.

"In all we have documented the deaths of 45,048 people," Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Agence France Presse.

The UAE supports a "non-sectarian" change in power in war-hit Syria, the WAM official news agency quoted the Gulf state's foreign minister as saying after he met with a top Syrian opposition leader.

"The United Arab Emirates supports a non-sectarian future change of government in Syria," Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan said late Tuesday after he met with the opposition National Coalition's chief, Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib in Abu Dhabi.

Fresh clashes erupted in the Palestinian Yarmuk camp in southern Damascus during the night, a watchdog said on Wednesday, a week after major fighting there sent some 100,000 refugees fleeing for safety.

The latest violence came despite an agreement between rebels and pro-regime Palestinian fighters that they would withdraw from the camp, which houses some 150,000 people.

The United States on Tuesday called on Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi to work to "bridge divisions," after Egyptian officials confirmed voters backed a controversial Islamist-backed constitution.

"The future of Egypt's democracy depends on forging a broader consensus behind its new democratic rules and institutions," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said in a statement.

Egypt's constitution was passed with 63.8 percent voter support in the two-stage referendum that ended last weekend, the national electoral commission said on Tuesday.

Turnout was 32.9 percent of Egypt's total 52 million voters, the president of the commission, Samir Abul Maati, told a news conference in Cairo.

A young unemployed teenager has killed himself in Sidi Bouzid, the marginalized town in central Tunisia where the country's revolution erupted two years ago, witnesses said on Tuesday.

Wissem Hani, 17, died on Sunday from a massive electric shock after clinging to an electric pylon in protest at his bleak circumstances, the witnesses told an AFP journalist.