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Officials said Iraqi forces have arrested 11 alleged Al-Qaeda members in connection with the recent deadly attacks in the southern city of Basra.
The city’s police chief, Faisal al-Abadi, said at a news conference that Iraqi forces have “penetrated and dismantled Al-Qaeda in the south.”
Syrian security forces are carrying out deadly attacks on opposition-held areas in the north and south and continuing to bombard Homs, activists say.
Some opposition groups report that more than 50 people have been killed over the course of the day.
The violence came as envoy Kofi Annan travelled to Qatar to brief the Arab League on the peace plan he negotiated.
Syrian forces on Saturday morning bombed for an hour the city of Homs on the third day of the cease-fire, according to a Syrian NGO. No casualties had been reported in the bombing of two districts there, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In the months before the truce, Homs, the third largest city, was heavily bombed, including its symbol Baba Amr district where the rebels were entrenched and which was taken over by the army on March 1 after a month of destructive shelling. The cease-fire was fragile in the past two days and ended with the deaths of 18 people, mostly civilians.
At least 15 suspected al-Qaida militants were killed in the battles with the army in the Louder city of Abyan on Monday, a day after two dozens were reported killed by drone attacks in the province, the Yemeni official agency Saba reported.
Security officials in Abyan told Yemen Post that seven troops were also killed.
Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed about 156 people nationwide on Saturday, about half of them were civilians, the Revolution Council reported, as the regime in Damascus intensified its brutal crackdown on the opposition three days ahead of U.N. deadline to pull back and end the violence.
Monitoring groups said most of the killings occurred in Hama, Homs and Aleppo. The Syrian Network for Human Rights reported more than 60 people were killed in the Homs suburb of Latamna alone, which came under heavy bombardments by army tanks.