Washington has reportedly asked for explanations from Bkirki on Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi’s controversial statements on Hizbullah’s arms and Syria.

Ad-Diyar daily said Monday that al-Rahi’s stances would hinder meetings between him and top U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour will hold a meeting with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Muallem to coordinate stances concerning the developments in the Arab world, As Safir newspaper reported on Monday.

Mansour and Muallem will coordinate during a meeting next Saturday in New York the stances of their countries regarding the popular uprisings in the Arab world and the general situation ahead of a meeting at the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday warned against "any foreign intervention that threatens to fragment states in the region and increase the risk of extremism in them," in talks with a Russian delegation on a mission to help end the government crackdown on anti-regime protests.

Assad also welcomed the "balanced and constructive Russian position toward the security and stability of Syria," the state-run SANA news agency reported.

Opponents of President Bashar Assad met in Damascus on Sunday calling for the continuation of popular protests to overthrow the "tyrannical" regime in power in Syria.

"We need to end the tyrannical security regime. We must overthrow the tyranny and the security (agents). We welcome all those who have no blood on their hands," said Hassan Abdul Azim, a member of the opposition National Coordinating Committee for Democratic Change.

Syrian security forces killed two people on Saturday as they conducted searches in the northwestern province of Idlib, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The victims, a man and a woman, were killed in the town of Khan Sheikhun, the British-based group told Agence France Presse by telephone.

A group of Russian lawmakers arrived in Damascus Saturday to meet Moscow ally President Bashar Assad and opposition figures in a bid to broker talks aimed at ending violence in the country, news agencies reported.

"Russia cares about the fate of the Syrian people. That's why we want to find a way to stop a negative scenario developing," Russia's Interfax quoted Ilyas Uumakhanov, vice president of the Russian upper house, as saying.

Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour stressed on Saturday that Lebanon, which is the president of the U.N. Security Council for the month of September, will not support any resolution that condemns the Syrian regime in its violent crackdown on protestors.

“Even Russia rejects a resolution against Syria in the form that the West wants,” he told Voice of Mada radio station.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday warned those involved in popular Arab uprisings against trusting Western powers and their "promises," saying they should instead confide in Islam for solutions.

"Never trust America, NATO, and criminal regimes like Britain, France and Italy -- who for a long time divided your lands (among themselves) and plundered them," Khamenei said as he opened a two-day conference in Tehran on "Islamic Awakening" attended by several hundred guests from Arab countries.

Nearly 4,000 people, who fled to Lebanon between March and September as Syrian troops crack down on anti-regime demonstrations, have registered with the United Nations, a report said.

The report by the UN Development Program released late on Friday said that more than 3,580 Syrians registered with the U.N. in north Lebanon by September 7, more than 600 of them between September 1 and 7.

A Lebanese and two Syrians have admitted to trying to smuggle arms to Syria to support anti-regime protestors in the neighboring country, a judicial source told As Safir daily published Saturday.

The newspaper said that the army intelligence thwarted the plot earlier in the week after it raided a neighborhood of the Beirut district of Tariq al-Jdideh and arrested Lebanese Ibrahim M. and Syrians Assef F. and Bassel Q.