British far-right leader Nick Griffin was among a group of European politicians visiting Syria on Tuesday at the invitation of President Bashar Assad's regime.

British National Party (BNP) spokesman Simon Darby said Griffin and other European delegates had been invited by the Syrian foreign ministry.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas met Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, a day after Israel's closest South American ally signed a free trade deal with the Jewish state.

Colombia was one of a minority of states to abstain in a vote on upgrading the Palestinians' status at the United Nations in November which passed with overwhelming international support.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday he had always believed that Syrian strongman Bashar Assad should have implemented political reforms that could have averted the current bloodbath.

But Putin also stressed that he remained firmly opposed to outside intervention and implied that Russia's position on the crisis remained unchanged.

The Syrian conflict is at a "turning point" with regime forces gaining ground, the French foreign ministry said Tuesday, adding that it was time to review whether to arm the opposition.

President Bashar Assad's regime has pledged to focus its attention on the northern city of Aleppo after winning a strategic victory by retaking Qusayr, a strategically important town on the border with Lebanon.

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.