Russia said on Thursday it was willing to join international efforts to safeguard Syria's chemical weapons during their destruction under an agreement brokered with Washington.

"When the process of eliminating the chemical weapons reaches its active phase, it will be necessary to provide for the safety of the sites where (the weapons) will be destroyed," said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.

Jihadist fighters linked to al-Qaida set fire to statues and crosses inside churches in northern Syria Thursday and destroyed a cross atop the clock tower of one of them, a watchdog said.

Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) entered the Greek Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation in the northern city of Raqa and torched the religious furnishings inside, the Syria Observatory for Human Rights said.

Tunisia's Islamist-led government said Thursday it had ordered a probe and contacted Interpol after a young Tunisian living abroad posted a photo of himself on the Internet trampling on the Koran.

The interior ministry said a preliminary inquiry found that the photo, published on social networking sites, was taken "by a young Tunisian under 20 years old living in a European country."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed Thursday on the need for a binding U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria's chemical arms, a U.S. official said.

Kerry and Wang "were in strong agreement" on the need to act quickly to nail down a U.N. Security Council resolution, the official said.

A young man once jailed for smuggling weapons for the Toronto 18 terror plot to attack Canada's parliament and other targets has been killed in Syria, local media said Thursday.

Somalia-born Canadian Ali Mohamed Dirie reportedly left Canada after his release from prison in 2011 to join rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

Egyptian prosecutors have extended the detention of an Al-Jazeera journalist for another 45 days, his lawyer said Thursday, amid accusations of a crackdown on the channel for pro-Islamist reporting.

Abdallah Elshami, an Egyptian citizen, was arrested on August 14 along with about 700 protesters when police and soldiers dispersed two Islamist protest camps in Cairo, sparking clashes that killed hundreds of protesters.

Sudan's foreign ministry denied Thursday that President Omar al-Bashir, who faces an international arrest warrant, has called off a trip to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly.

"The foreign ministry denies reports from news agencies citing a U.N. spokesman that the president of the republic has decided not to attend the U.N. General Assembly," state news agency SUNA reported.

Iranian leader Hasan Rouhani Thursday called on Israel to admit it has a nuclear bomb ahead of a landmark meeting between Iranian and western foreign ministers.

Rouhani also said he believed a deal could be struck with the international community on his own country's controversial nuclear drive within three to six months.

The Bahrain Center for Human Rights won Norway's Rafto Prize for rights defenders Thursday for its fight against repression in the Gulf state.

The award would "turn the spotlight on systematic violations of human rights in a region where abuse is too often met with silence from Western governments," the Rafto Foundation said in a statement.

Iran's former reformist president Mohammad Khatami has called for the release of all political prisoners, notably opposition chiefs Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

"We're happy with the (judiciary's) announced pardon of 80 prisoners but we ask: 'Why this number?'" the reformist daily Etemad quoted him as saying.