A Saudi diplomat abducted by al-Qaida in Yemen's south has made a new appeal to King Abdullah to secure his release by meeting the demands of his captors, according to a video posted on jihadist forums.

"Why are you refusing to free the prisoners?" Abdullah al-Khalidi asked the Saudi monarch in the video posted Sunday and published hours later by SITE Intelligence Group.

Violence across Syria killed at least 43 people on Sunday, 36 of them civilians caught in fierce fighting between troops and armed insurgents.

Sunday's highest concentration of deaths was in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor where nine civilians and three rebels were reportedly killed.

Jordan's King Abdullah II on Sunday called on opposition parties, particularly the Islamists, to take part in general elections later this year after they threatened to boycott the polls.

A criminal court judge was among three people killed in gun and bomb attacks north of the Iraqi capital on Sunday, security and medical officials said, in the latest in a spike in nationwide unrest.

In the restive city of Mosul, gunmen shot dead Judge Abdul Latif Mohammed while he was driving home, said police First Lieutenant Mohammed al-Juburi and Dr Mahmud Haddad in Mosul's main hospital.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards announced they are to fire ballistic and other missiles at desert targets during three days of war games starting Monday in a warning to threats of military action by Israel and the United States.

"Long-, medium- and short-range surface-to-surface missiles will be fired from different locations in Iran... at replica airbases like those used by out-of-region military forces," the head of the Guards aerospace division in charge of missile systems, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said.

Turkey scrambled fighter jets after Syrian helicopters flew close to the border, the army said Sunday, hiking tensions following last month's downing of a Turkish plane.

Four F-16 warplanes took off from Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey after Syrian helicopters flew four miles closer to the border than is normal, the statement said.

Leila Ben Ali, the reviled wife of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, said both the deposed Tunisian dictator and her hoped for "justice" in an interview published by French daily Le Parisien on Sunday.

In the first interview since the couple fled to Saudi Arabia after a popular uprising in January last year that sparked the Arab Spring protests, she also said her husband wanted Tunisians to recognize his achievements.

Iran on Sunday said weekend talks held between major powers seeking a solution to the conflict in Syria were "unsuccessful" because it and Syria were excluded.

"This meeting was unsuccessful... because Syria was not present and some influential nations were not present," Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs Hossein Amir Abdolahian told state television.

Russian technicians were involved in the taking down of the Turkish fighter jet by the Syrian military last week, the Sunday Times reported on Sunday.

Quoting Middle Eastern diplomatic sources, the Times reported that the decision to down the Turkish jet was intended to signal a warning to NATO to stay out of the conflict raging in Syria for over a year.

Turkey's military insisted Sunday that a jet fighter shot down by Syrian forces on June 22 was in international airspace, and not inside Syria, as claimed in a newspaper report citing U.S. intelligence.

The Turkish F-4 Phantom "was downed over the eastern Mediterranean in international airspace ... while it was flying solo and unarmed, and testing our existing radars' performance in the region," the army's general staff said in a statement posted on its website.