Syria's President Bashar Assad acknowledged the shrinking ranks of his government's army in a rare public speech on Sunday, but insisted the force was still capable of beating rebel fighters.

Speaking in Damascus, Assad also said any "dialogue that is not based on the fight against terrorism would be meaningless".

Rebel rocket fire on a government-held area of Syria's second city Aleppo killed five children, four of them brothers, a monitoring group said on Sunday.

The Saturday evening rocket struck the Shahba al-Jadida district in the west of the city, where loyalist forces have held out since rebels seized the east in 2012, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Bahrain said it detained two men accused of trying to smuggle weapons from Iran, with which the small Gulf kingdom has strained relations.

Machine guns, ammunition and C4 explosives were found after the boat was seized off Bahrain last week, the interior ministry said in a statement late Saturday.

An Australian nurse was charged with terrorism offences for allegedly supporting the Islamic State group in Syria on Sunday after he voluntarily returned home from the troubled country.

The 39-year-old Melbourne father of five, named in local media as Islamic convert Adam Brookman, briefly faced a Melbourne court on Sunday after surrendering himself to officials in Turkey on Tuesday, Australian Federal Police said.

A car bomb attack killed two Turkish soldiers in the Kurdish-dominated southeast of the country, after separatist rebels warned they would no longer observe a truce after Ankara's air strikes on their positions in Iraq, officials said Sunday.

Turkey has launched a two-pronged "anti-terror" cross-border offensive against Islamic State (IS) jihadists and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants after a wave of violence in the country, pounding their positions with air strikes and artillery.

Hillary Clinton will testify publicly on October 22 before a congressional panel probing the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, her presidential campaign said Saturday.

The attack left ambassador Chris Stevens dead, along with three other Americans, and has haunted Clinton as a policy-maker and presidential candidate ever since.

Bahrain has decided to recall its ambassador to Tehran in protest at "hostile" comments by Iranian leaders, the official BNA news agency reported on Saturday.

It said the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (SCIA) "strongly denounced the repeated blatant Iranian interference in Bahrain's internal affairs in order to shake up the kingdom's stability and fan tension".

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has replaced three senior army officers with responsibilities for domestic security matters and for his own security, the media reported Saturday.

The three, all major generals, headed the North African nation's counter-espionage unit, presidential security and the Republican Guard, the newspapers El-Watan and Liberte and television channel Ennahar reported.

Kurdish militia have expanded their control over portions of a major Syrian city in their fightback against the Islamic State group, to the detriment of government forces there, a monitor said Saturday. 

"The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) are advancing in Hasakeh city against IS and at the expense of the regime," said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. 

The Saudi-led coalition bombing Yemeni rebels since March declared a five-day truce Saturday so aid can reach a country the U.N. says is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster.

Announcing the unilateral truce to begin from midnight Sunday, a statement on the official Saudi Press Agency said the coalition also reserved the right to respond to "military activity or movement" by the Shiite Huthi rebels during the ceasefire.