Two suspected al-Qaida fighters were killed in clashes with Yemeni troops in the restive southern province of Abyan, a local official said on Sunday.

The clashes flared on Saturday night in the provincial capital Zinjibar, where troops have been battling militants for nearly eight months to regain control of territory lost to the extremist group last May.

Syrian security forces shot dead twelve people on Sunday across the country, activists said, as army defectors briefly overran a protest hub near Damascus.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said regime troops killed seven people in the Damascus suburbs of Douma, al-Kisweh and Talfita, three in the restive northwestern province of Idlib and one in each of the central opposition bastions of Hama and Homs.

Gunmen killed four Iraqi soldiers in an attack in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah west of Baghdad on Saturday, the provincial security command center said.

The attack took place at a checkpoint near a public park in the center of the city, 60 kilometers (35 miles) west of the capital, at around 6:45 pm (1545 GMT), according to Major Yassin Mohammed in Anbar province operations center.

Seventeen people have died after a storm capsized a passenger boat off of Iran's southern coast, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday.

The boat sank Saturday evening while sailing between Hormuz Island and the port city of Bandar Abbas on the mainland, the report said. Rescue teams saved five passengers.

The opposition Syrian National Council plans to send a delegation to the United Nations to press the U.N. Security Council for intervention in unrest-swept Syria, an SNC spokesman told Agence France Presse on Sunday.

"The Council will send a delegation to the United Nations to submit a letter calling for the referral of the Syria file to the Security Council to protect civilians," Mohammed Sermini said in Cairo.

Human Rights Watch urged world powers to support the rights of Arab Spring protesters to build real democracies after they ousted long-time strongmen once backed by the West, in its annual report Sunday.

"Many democracies have allowed their ties with repressive allies to temper their support for human rights in the Arab Spring protests," HRW said in its report, launched in Cairo just three days before the anniversary of the revolt that toppled president Hosni Mubarak.

Palestinian gunmen opened fire at an Israeli army patrol near the West Bank city of Ramallah overnight, an Israeli military spokeswoman said on Sunday.

"During a routine patrol during the night, shots were fired by Palestinians at a military vehicle near Ramallah without causing injuries. The vehicle was lightly damaged," she told Agence France Presse

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday called Egypt's foreign minister to discuss the country's economic and political situation, as well as events in Syria, the State Department said.

It said the telephone call covered the same ground as President Barack Obama's discussion with Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi on Friday, which the White House said was focused on Egypt's need for a democratic transition.

A Kuwaiti former oil minister and senior member of the Al-Sabah ruling family, Sheikh Saud Nasser al-Sabah, has died after a long battle with cancer, said the royal court. He was 68.

Sheikh Saud died late on Saturday night in a Kuwaiti hospital, the court said in a statement.

About 200 Palestinians staged a demonstration on Saturday in the West Bank town of Ramallah against the exploratory talks with Israel being held in Jordan.

Palestinian and Israeli negotiators have held three such meetings in Amman this month in a bid to restart direct peace talks which have been on ice since September 2010, but without any concrete results.