A truck bomb blamed on Al-Qaida killed 25 people at a crowded market in central Iraq on Tuesday while attacks elsewhere claimed 11 lives, the latest victims of a spike in nationwide unrest.

The violence, the bloodiest of which was in predominantly Shiite areas, came ahead of commemoration ceremonies on Friday for the birth of a key figure in Shiite Islam, and left nearly 100 people wounded in the worst unrest to hit Iraq in three weeks.

Syrian President Bashar Assad regretted that his country's defense forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet on June 22, he said in an interview with the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet published Tuesday.

"The plane was flying in an air corridor used three times in the past by the Israeli airforce," he said, but added that he regretted the incident -- which has further fuelled tensions between the two former allies -- "100 percent.”

Iran on Tuesday test-fired in its central desert a ballistic missile capable of striking Israel as part of war games designed to show its ability to retaliate if attacked, media said.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired the medium-range Shahab-3 missile at a mock target in the Kavir Desert on the second day of its Great Prophet 7 exercise, which is due to end on Wednesday, Iran's Al-Alam television network reported.

Dozens of Syrian soldiers including top officers, defected to neighboring Turkey on Monday, the Anatolia news agency reported.

The 85 soldiers who fled include one general and other senior officials, the agency said, citing local officials.

Exiled opposition groups tried to forge a common vision for a transition in Syria as they met Monday in Cairo while the U.N. human rights chief accused the regime and the opposition of "serious" violations.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay also charged that weapons supplied to both the government and opposition were escalating the conflict, telling reporters in New York that "further militarization" must be avoided.

The U.N. pointman for Palestinian human rights launched a blistering attack on the international community Monday, accusing it of conspiring in Israeli settlement policies and branding the peace process a "trick".

Richard Falk, the special U.N. rapporteur for human rights in the occupied territories, also took aim at the so-called Middle East Quartet's peace envoy Tony Blair over his efforts in the region.

Iranian MPs have signed a draft law aimed at banning Europe-bound oil tankers from using the Strait of Hormuz to punish EU nations that slapped sanctions on the Islamic republic, reports said on Monday.

"This project is a response to the oil sanctions imposed by the European Union on the Islamic republic," Ebrahim Agha Mohammadi, of parliament's foreign affairs committee, was quoted as saying by Mehr news agency.

The Roman Catholic Church in the Holy Land on Monday hailed the granting by UNESCO of world heritage status to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as a "diplomatic victory" for the Palestinians.

But it called on the Palestinian Authority to respect existing arrangements dividing care of the West Bank site between the Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches.

A U.N. sanctions committee on Monday removed a leading London-based Saudi reform activist from its al-Qaida blacklist in the face of opposition from the Saudi government.

Saad al-Faqih and his Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia were both removed from the U.N.'s al-Qaida sanctions list following a recommendation from an ombudsman.

The Hamas government in the Gaza Strip said on Monday it has "temporarily" halted voter registration just over a month after granting the electoral commission permission to work.