Thousands of Syrian refugees in Turkey are choosing to return home, although the neighboring country is still sheltering some 10,000 people, Turkish officials said on Sunday.

Some 343 Syrians went back to their country on Saturday, taking the total number of returnees to 5,001, the country's disaster and emergency management agency said on its website.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Thursday that he plans to visit Syria, facing mounting criticism for its bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, while on a tour of the region.

Davutoglu said that he hoped at the weekend "to leave for a tour of countries in the Middle East which will include Syria," the Anatolia news agency reported.

Turkey's new parliament opened in a tense atmosphere Tuesday as the main opposition and Kurdish deputies boycotted the ceremony in protest over lawmakers kept in prison.

It was hardly the start Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have hoped for after winning a third straight term in power in June 12 elections and promising to reconcile with the opposition for a major constitutional overhaul, his key election pledge.

The number of Syrians taking refuge at tent cities in Turkey has decreased to 11,122 after several hundred people went back home, Turkish officials said Monday.

"On June 26-27, 375 of those who had crossed to our country returned home of their own free will, while another 39 Syrian citizens were admitted in," the emergency situations agency said on its website.

Separatist Kurdish rebels opened fire on a military vehicle in eastern Turkey, killing a soldier and wounding three others, Anatolia news agency reported Monday.

The vehicle came under attack from militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in a rural area in Van province, the report said.

Syrian tanks on Saturday rolled into a village on the border with Turkey where workers are scrambling to erect a huge tent city for fear of a new exodus of refugees from the crackdown.

As families across Syria mourned 18 protesters gunned down by security forces on Friday, activists said troops backed by tanks rumbled into al-Najia village near Jisr al-Shughur, a town which the army seized on June 12 after repeated protests.

A Turkish court has charged four soldiers over an alleged 2003 plot to overthrow the Islamist-rooted government and ordered them detained pending trial, Anatolia news agency reported Saturday.

Two-star admiral Mucahit Sislioglu, a colonel, and two other soldiers were questioned Friday and then charged as part of an expanding probe into a purported coup plot, codenamed "Operation Sledgehammer," that has already landed some 200 soldiers in court.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tasked Vice Premier and Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon to reconcile with Turkey, Israeli media revealed on Friday.

Yaalon held talks with two high-ranking officials in the Turkish foreign ministry, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Channel 2 television network unveiled.

Hundreds of displaced Syrians poured into Turkey on Thursday after Syrian troops backed by tanks approached their makeshift camps along the border, an Agence France Presse journalist reported.

Several hundred people broke through the barbed wire marking the frontier between the two countries and were seen advancing into Turkish territory on a road used by Turkish border guards, a few kilometers from the Turkish village of Guvecci.

A leading Kurdish politician warned Turkey of renewed bloodshed Wednesday after the authorities stripped a prominent Kurdish activist of his seat in parliament, Anatolia news agency reported.

"This is a decision to drag Turkey into chaos... to push our people into an environment of conflict," Ahmet Turk, head of a Kurdish umbrella organization, said in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish-majority southeast.