Turkey's interior minister said Sunday some 115 Kurdish rebels have been killed in a large-scale military offensive launched in the southeast of the country in July.

"We reached the conclusion that 115 members of the separatist terrorist organization have been rendered ineffective" since an offensive launched on July 23 to 24, Idris Naim Sahin was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency, referring to members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

A British photographer who was held hostage in Syria for a week said on Sunday that his captors were international jihadists who included several Britons.

Freelance photographer John Cantile and his Dutch colleague Jeroen Oerlemans were kidnapped in northern Syria on July 19 and freed a week later.

Attacks mainly targeting Iraqi security forces killed four people, among them three policemen, and wounded nine on Sunday, security and medical officials said.

So far this month attacks have killed 54 people, 41 of them members of the security forces, according to an Agence France Presse tally based on security and medical sources.

Germany's defense minister again ruled out military intervention in Syria Sunday, warning it should not be considered a knee-jerk response to the failure of diplomatic efforts to end the bloodshed.

Thomas de Maiziere told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that Kofi Annan's decision to quit as international peace envoy to Syria did not change Germany's stance on the sending of troops into the nearly 17-month conflict.

Saudi King Abdullah invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for an extraordinary summit of Muslim leaders to be held this month in the holy city of Mecca, state news agency SPA reported Sunday.

The Saudi monarch "sent a written letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inviting him to attend the extraordinary Islamic solidarity meeting which will be held in Mecca" in mid-August, SPA reported.

A key meeting of Non-Aligned Movement ministers which was to have taken place in the West Bank on Sunday was cancelled after Israel denied several of them entry, officials said.

The ministers were to have attended a two-day meeting of the movement's Palestine Committee in Ramallah at which they were poised to sign a declaration in support of a fresh Palestinian bid for upgraded U.N. membership.

A Palestinian man was killed and another wounded in an Israeli drone strike on Rafah in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, medics and witnesses said.

The men were riding a motorcycle at the time.

General Mohammed Ahmed Faris, a military aviator who became the first Syrian in space, fled to Turkey on Sunday after defecting from President Bashar Assad's regime, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Before crossing into Turkey, Faris visited the headquarters of the Free Syrian Army in his home town Aleppo in a show of solidarity with rebel forces battling Assad's troops in Syria's biggest city, it said.

A Syrian opposition source dismissed Sunday as fake an online video of the 48 Iranians kidnapped in Damascus, saying it was designed to cover-up the responsibility of hardline Sunni Islamist group Jundallah.

The source said that the faction -- which has no relation with the Sunni rebel group of the same name active in southeastern Iran -- was one of an array of Sunni Islamist factions that have proliferated in Syria in recent months.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Turkey next Saturday for talks on the conflict in Syria, a State Department spokeswoman said.

"Clinton goes to Istanbul for bilateral consultations with the Turkish government on Syria as well as to cover other timely issues," the spokeswoman told reporters in the Malawian capital Lilongwe.