More than 1,000 Kurdish career soldiers in the Iraqi army have deserted and want to be integrated into forces loyal to Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, officials said on Tuesday.

The move comes after the Kurdish troops disobeyed orders to take part in an operation ordered by the Shiite-led government in Baghdad against a mainly Sunni Arab town.

Iran has received a verbal invitation to attend the proposed peace conference on Syria, the Islamic Republic's deputy foreign minister said on Tuesday without specifying who extended the invitation.

"Ten days ago, we received a verbal invitation to take part in this conference," Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian told reporters in Moscow.

A father of Algeria's independence has urged the army to end the country's leadership crisis, calling ailing and incapacitated President Abdelaziz Bouteflika a despot who had been "elected and re-elected" by the military.

In a letter published on Tuesday, Mohamed Mechati did not go so far as to say the army should oust Bouteflika, hospitalized in France since April, but said "your courage and your patriotism... requires that you act swiftly for the survival of our country."

The U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday that it was in talks with Germany over the potential resettlement of 10,000 Syrians who have fled their war-torn homeland, and was probing the issue with other rich nations.

"We are working with governments, including European governments, to examine ways in which further admission programs and or resettlement programs for Syrians could be successfully used," said UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards.

A Jordanian military tribunal jailed on Tuesday three men convicted of trying to join Syria's jihadist Al-Nusra Front and fight President Bashar Assad's regime.

"The state security court today initially sentenced the three to five years in jail each, but immediately halved the prison terms," a court official told Agence France Presse.

Saudi authorities beheaded on Tuesday a Syrian man convicted of trying to smuggle narcotics into the ultra-conservative kingdom, the interior ministry said.

Hussam al-Rjoob had attempted to "smuggle a large amount of narcotic tablets," the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

Austrian troops in the U.N. monitoring force on the Golan Heights will begin pulling out on Wednesday, the defense ministry said, just days after Vienna's controversial decision to quit the mission.

"Between 60 and 80 troops will return to Austria tomorrow afternoon," defense ministry spokesman Andreas Strobl told Agence France Presse Tuesday.

Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani will step down in the coming weeks as part of a wider power transition that may also see the emir ceding power to his son, media reports have said.

The reports quoted sources as saying that the PM, who also serves as the foreign minister, could be replaced by Crown Prince Sheikh Tamim, until he takes over as emir when his father Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani eventually steps down.

A key suspect in twin car bombings that killed 52 people in a Turkish city near the Syrian border last month has been arrested while trying to flee to country, local officials said Tuesday.

"An individual who appears to be one of the main suspects of the twin attacks was arrested on the evening of June 10 as he tried to cross the (Syrian) border," the governor's office in the southeastern province of Hatay, where the bombs went off, said in a statement.

A wave of attacks mostly targeting security forces in Sunni areas of Iraq killed at least 73 people, officials said on Tuesday, updating the toll from the violence a day earlier.

Monday's unrest, which wounded more than 250 people, is the latest in a surge in bloodshed that, along with a long-running political stalemate, has stoked fears of a return of the all-out sectarian war in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.