Politicians have reached an agreement on a future political system in Tunisia, ending a months-old stalemate that had blocked progress on drafting the new constitution, the head of the ruling Islamist party said on Friday.

"We have overcome the impasse, we are heading towards a mixed regime where neither the head of state nor the head of the government will have supreme control over the executive power," Rached Ghannouchi told Tunisian radio.

The U.N. Security Council is not entitled to give the green light for inspections of Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday, seeing it as an attempt to prepare "foreign intervention".

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) "is competent for (organizing) visits of refugee camps that have been set by the U.N., the Security Council has no competence for that," Lavrov said in Slovenia.

A U.S. journalist missing in war-torn Syria is believed to be held by government intelligence agents at a detention center near Damascus, a spokesman for his family said Friday.

James Foley, a 39-year-old freelancer who has filed reports for GlobalPost, Agence France-Presse and other outlets, has been missing in Syria for nearly six months.

Rebels in Syria fired two rockets at Damascus international airport on Friday, hitting an aircraft and a fuel dump and sparking a massive fire, the official SANA news agency reported.

"One rocket hit a kerosene tank and the other hit a parked commercial aircraft, badly damaging it," the agency said, adding that traffic at the facility was "normal" and the fire had been extinguished.

Tunisia's army Friday pressed its hunt for a jihadist group hiding out in a border region with Algeria, an operation in which 15 security force members have been wounded, the interior ministry said.

"The search operations by the defense forces and the national guard are continuing on Mount Chaambi," ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui told Agence France Presse.

Clashes in northern Iraq killed nine police on Friday, while a car bomb targeting worshipers near a Sunni mosque north of Baghdad left at least five dead, officials said.

The fighting between police and armed men in west Mosul, including mortar rounds fired at checkpoints, killed nine police and wounded seven, police and a doctor said.

The United States still hopes a conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East can take place soon, a high-level U.S. official said Friday, urging regional players to cooperate.

"I think it could be very soon, if the will exists among the regional parties to engage with each other and to respect each others' needs," said Thomas Countryman, U.S. assistant secretary of international security and nonproliferation.

When a landmine blew Syrian rebel Jamil Lala's foot off, he expected to be relegated to a non-combat role far behind the front lines and away from his comrades.

Instead he learned to walk on a prosthetic limb and headed to the front to be closer to his men.

Syrian troops Friday bombarded Sunni areas of the Mediterranean city of Banias, a monitoring group said, warning of a new "massacre," as Washington said for the first time it was looking at arming rebels.

The opposition National Coalition earlier denounced a "large-scale massacre" by troops and militiamen on Thursday in a Sunni village near Banias, a new front in Syria's war, citing witness reports of civilians being stabbed to death.

A majority of U.N. Security Council members support a trip to inspect Syrian refugee camps inside Jordan but Russia and China remain opposed to a visit, diplomats said Thursday.

Jordan this week warned that the growing exodus of Syrian refugees who had flooded over its border to escape civil war -- already over 500,000 -- was placing a "crushing weight" on the country.