Thousands of Bahrainis have launched what they said would be a week of daily sit-in protests in a Shiite village to commemorate an uprising crushed a year ago, witnesses said on Saturday.

They said the protesters gathered on Friday at a rallying point renamed "Freedom Square" in al-Muqsha village, about seven kilometers (four miles) west of Manama.

A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle at an elite Republican Guard camp southwest of the Yemeni capital on Saturday, days after al-Qaida claimed a similar attack that killed 26 soldiers, military sources said.

One soldier was killed in the blast at the base in Bayda, 170 kilometers (105 miles) from Sanaa, the sources added. Five other soldiers were also wounded.

Syrian forces seemed to be directly targeting journalists in Homs, wounded French reporter Edith Bouvier and photographer William Daniels said Saturday, after escaping the besieged city.

"There were at least five successive explosions, very near. We really had the impression that we were directly targeted," the Figaro daily quoted the pair as saying after their return to Paris Friday.

The United States called Friday on all countries to condemn the "horrific" violence in Syria as President Barack Obama declared that leader Bashar al-Assad's days were numbered.

U.S. officials voiced outrage as the Red Cross said it was unable to gain access to the vanquished rebel stronghold of Baba Amr in Homs, where government forces were reported to be conducting reprisals after a month-long bombardment.

Iran's media reported a huge turnout on Friday in parliamentary elections described as a "blow" to the West, while voters said they were mostly preoccupied with their sanctions-hit economy -- and non-voters spoke of a "sham" poll.

The elections to fill the 290 seats in parliament, known as the Majlis, were the first since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was returned to office in a disputed 2009 vote that prompted opposition cries of fraud.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday he will not set "red lines" for military action against Iran, insisting he wanted to preserve the Jewish state's freedom to maneuver.

"I have not set down red lines to the United States and will not set down red lines," he said. "I want to reserve Israel's freedom to maneuver in light of threats, every country would demand that."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday said Syrian authorities will "be called to account for their crimes before international criminal jurisdictions," as two French journalists evacuated from Syria's battered city Homs arrived at a military airport near Paris after escaping the besieged protest hub where two of their colleagues were killed.

Sarkozy, who announced earlier on Friday that Paris would close its embassy in Syria to denounce President Bashar al-Assad's "scandalous" repression, paid homage to the journalists on their arrival.

Amnesty International said on Friday it has canceled a visit to Bahrain over restrictions imposed on rights groups monitoring the situation there, one year after an uprising was crushed.

"Regrettably we have cancelled the fact-finding visit to Bahrain ... as the new five day limit imposed by the Bahraini authorities for visits by international human rights organizations is a serious impediment to their ability to do their human rights work," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty's deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Al-Qaida is moving from Iraq to Syria, where the government is carrying out a bloody crackdown on an uprising, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in an interview published on Friday.

"Al-Qaida has started migrating from Iraq to Syria, and maybe it will migrate from Syria to another country, to Libya or to Egypt or to any region where the regime is unstable and out of control," Maliki said in an interview with Saudi daily Okaz.

The Syrian regime may have won the battle of Baba Amr against lightly armed rebels, but spreading protests indicate this victory on the ground is unlikely to clear the country's political impasse, analysts said on Friday.

The small district in the central city of Homs had become a symbol of the almost year-long uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.