Prime Minister Ali Larayedh said on Thursday that Tunisia is making progress in its bid to dismantle "terrorist" cells despite the presence in the country of armed groups and recent clashes with Islamists.

"There is progress in dismantling the terrorist networks. We are confronted by small groups who practice terrorism and have links to terrorist parties," Larayedh told a news conference.

Twin car bombings at an army base and a French-run uranium mine in northern Niger killed at least 10 people Thursday, in unprecedented attacks claimed by an Islamist group fighting French-led troops in neighboring Mali.

The Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) claimed the bombings, calling them punishment for Niger's participation in a French-led military offensive against Islamist extremists who had seized control of northern Mali last year and ruled it under a brutal version of Islamic law for some 10 months.

Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday the brutal murder of a soldier by two suspected Islamists on a London street was an attack on Britain and a betrayal of Islam.

"This was not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life. It was also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country," he said.

Syria's outgoing opposition chief published an initiative for his war-torn country on Thursday that would grant President Bashar Assad a safe exit, and urged dissident factions to adopt his plan.

Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib published his initiative on Facebook, as the main National Coalition he headed until March gathered in Istanbul to choose a new leader and discuss a U.S.-Russian peace initiative dubbed Geneva 2.

Tehran on Thursday denied a Bahraini claim it had found an Iranian drone in the sea near Saudi Arabia, and urged Manama to refrain from making "baseless accusations", the ISNA news agency reported.

It cited an unnamed foreign ministry source as denying Bahrain's assertion that the downed aircraft was Iranian.

A military court in the Gaza Strip has sentenced a Palestinian to death for collaborating with Israel and another to life with hard labor, the Hamas interior ministry said on Thursday.

The 43-year-old, identified only by his initials AH, "has been sentenced to capital punishment for acts of collaboration wit the occupation", a ministry statement said.

Gunmen shot dead four Iraqi soldiers on Thursday, security and medical officials said, the latest attacks in a wave of violence that has killed more than 410 people so far this month.

The gunmen attacked a checkpoint in Taji, north of Baghdad, killing the soldiers and wounding five others, the officials said.

Seventy-five fighters from Hizbullah have been killed in Syria since late last year, a source close to the group said on Thursday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights gave a higher death toll, saying 104 Hizbullah members had been killed in Syria since last autumn, but a Hizbullah spokesman denied the figures.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon pledged Thursday that U.N. troops will be in place within "one or two months" to battle armed rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo's volatile east, as he arrived in the flashpoint city of Goma for a brief visit.

Ban's visit came after three days of sometimes deadly fighting between rebels and government forces that ended months of calm in the mineral-rich east of the country, an area gripped by conflict for more than two decades.

An international media watchdog has criticized a UAE court decision to uphold a 10-month jail sentence for a user of microblogging website Twitter who posted about the trial of 94 Islamists.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also called for the immediate release of another man it said was arrested in the United Arab Emirates this month on similar charges.