Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party elected former parliament chief Saed al-Katatni on Friday to replace Morsi, who stepped down on taking over the presidency.

Katatni, who headed the Islamist-dominated parliament dissolved shortly before Morsi's election in June, beat his rival Essam al-Erian with roughly 67 percent of the vote by party delegates.

U.N. and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi arrived on Friday in Damascus as he bids to secure a ceasefire in Syria's 19-month conflict, an AFP journalist said.

Brahimi was received at Damascus airport by Syria's deputy Foreign Minister, Faisal Muqdad, and was scheduled to meet Foreign Minister Walid Muallem on Saturday.

European leaders said Friday they are concerned by the increasing violence in Syria and want opposition groups there to cooperate to ensure a peaceful change of government.

The 27 EU leaders voiced "deep concern with the increasingly deteriorating situation," in a draft summit statement seen by AFP.

Syrian regime warplanes have dropped cluster bombs in sorties against rebels in the northwestern town of Maaret al-Numan, the insurgents told AFP on Friday.

The rebels showed an AFP correspondent in the battleground Idlib province town debris from one such cluster bomb and dozens of other bomblets that failed to explode on impact.

African and European leaders will meet in Bamako on Friday to work on the logistics of reconquering Mali's desert north from armed Islamists.

The summit comes a week after the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution giving West African nations 45 days to lay out details for a military intervention.

Turkey on Friday called for Syria's regime to immediately stop deadly aerial bombing of rebel targets and for the two sides to observe a truce ahead of the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday next week.

"It is particularly important that the Syrian regime immediately stop and without conditions, the recent attacks against the population with planes and helicopters," Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters in Ankara.

A spokesman for Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi confirmed on Thursday the authenticity of a controversial letter describing his Israeli counterpart as a "great" friend, saying it followed protocol.

The letter, sent for the confirmation of Egypt's new ambassador to Tel Aviv, was leaked to the Israeli press and sparked criticism at home for the Islamist Morsi, who has so far refused to mention Israel by name in his speeches.

Syria's air force carried out raids on Friday morning against rebels besieging a major military base in the northwestern province of Idlib, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Military aircraft dropped bombs that targeted rebels camped near (the base at) Wadi Deif," concentrating their firepower on the villages of Talmans and Maashemsha, said the Britain-based monitoring group.

Al-Qaida militants set off an explosives-laden car inside an army base in southern Yemen at dawn on Friday, killing at least 14 soldiers, military officials said.

The militants drove through several checkpoints before entering the base of the Yemeni army's 115th brigade in Abyan province, where a drone raid killed at least seven Al-Qaida members the day before, one official told AFP.

Former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan said Thursday that Iran has told him it would accept the fall of Syrian ally Bashar Assad if the conflict-torn country holds elections.

Annan, who served until August as the U.N.-Arab League special envoy on Syria, renewed his call for a peaceful solution to the crisis and warned that foreign weapons were only fueling a conflict said to have claimed more than 34,000 lives.