Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday invited Pope Francis to visit the Holy Land, during an audience in the Vatican, journalists present said.

Abbas spoke to Vatican foreign affairs official Dominique Mambert after the audience, saying: "It was a pleasure and I invited him to the Holy Land".

The world's chemical weapons watchdog said Thursday that it had completed nearly half its inspections of Syria's arsenal, despite working against a background of car bombings and mortar attacks.

"We have done nearly 50 percent of the verification work of the facilities that have been declared to us," Malik Ellahi, a political adviser on Syria for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, told journalists in The Hague.

Turkey has shelled positions held by jihadist fighters in neighboring Syria for the first time, the army said, in retaliation for a mortar round that fell on Turkish territory.

"Four artillery rounds were fired on October 15 against a position near the town of Azaz held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)," an al-Qaida affiliated group, the army chief of staff said in a statement late Wednesday.

International peace talks on Syria could be held next month, a top Syrian official said Thursday, although Russia quickly stressed that it was up to the United Nations to announce a firm date.

Asked at a press conference in Moscow if the talks have been pushed back to late November or early December, Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil said they could take place "November 23-24".

Fighting between the Syrian army and rebels at a prison in the northern city of Aleppo eased on Thursday, a day after the insurgents assaulted the facility, activists said.

The mostly jihadist rebel forces launched an attack on the regime-controlled prison on Wednesday night, in the heaviest fighting for the jail in months, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Suicide bombers killed 19 people in two attacks in northern Iraq on Thursday, while two more people died in other violence, officials said.

One suicide bomber detonated a vehicle rigged with explosives in a residential area of Al-Muwaffaqiyah, a village east of Mosul that is mainly populated by members of the Shabak minority.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will meet President Barack Obama at the White House on November 1, U.S. officials said.

The talks will come with Iraq embroiled in sectarian violence, which has raised fears of a relapse into the bloodshed that killed thousands of people during 2006-2007 under the U.S. occupation.

Amnesty International accused Egypt Thursday of unlawfully detaining and deporting hundreds of Syrian refugees, many of them women and children fleeing civil war at home.

"Instead of offering vital help and support to refugees from Syria, the Egyptian authorities are arresting and deporting them, flouting human rights standards," Sherif Elsayed Ali, Amnesty's head of refugee and migrants' rights said in a statement.

Egypt's foreign minister acknowledged in comments published Wednesday that relations with Washington were in a "delicate" phase after it suspended some military aid in response to a July 3 coup.

Nabil Fahmy said the U.S. administration had overestimated the amount of leverage that its aid dollars bought it over the policies of the interim government installed by the army after it overthrew elected Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

Rebels assaulted the regime-controlled central prison in the main northern city of Aleppo on Wednesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The mostly jihadist fighters launched an attack on the administrative building of the prison, which has been under siege since April.