Iran's parliament speaker Ali Larijani on Friday noted that “Lebanese leaders enjoy the sufficient capability to resolve their problems," adding that "some forces want to destabilize Lebanon but do not have the ability to do so."

Larijani was in Beirut as part of a regional tour aimed at finding ways to resolve the crisis in Syria, media reports said.

A Syrian state television journalist was shot dead in the capital on Wednesday, the latest in a string of employees of pro-government media to be killed, the official SANA news agency reported.

"An armed terrorist group assassinated journalist at the Public Authority for Radio and Television, Basel Tawfiq Yousef, in the Tadamun neighborhood of Damascus," the news agency said.

Seated in a plush Vienna hotel, Rafik Schami is half a world away from the unrest tearing Syria apart. But that doesn't stop the author caring and worrying deeply about the country he fled 41 years ago.

Even in the best-case scenario, the award-winning Schami told Agence France Presse in an interview, creating a democratic Syria once "dictator" Bashar Assad has gone will take at least a decade of "sweat and tears,"

Sheikh Abbas Zgheib, who has been tasked by the Higher Islamic Shiite Council to follow up the case of the abducted Lebanese pilgrims in Syria in May, denied on Friday reports that they will be released soon.

“We have no information on the matter, other than the reports we hear in the media,” Zgheib said in comments published in Kuwait's As-Siyasah newspaper.

The spread of Syria's civil war has made it increasingly difficult for civilians to escape the conflict, and many are afraid to seek medical care, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Thursday.

"Through the spreading of the fighting people lose ... escape routes out of the fights," Peter Maurer told reporters in Stockholm after a meeting with Sweden's Development Aid Minister Gunilla Carlsson.

Hundreds of Kurdish militiamen clashed on Thursday with mainly jihadist rebels who had seized much of the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ain from government forces, a watchdog said.

It was the latest in a string of drives for control of mainly Kurdish inhabited areas of the northeast and northwest that neighboring Turkey fears has given succor to the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) it has been fighting for nearly three decades.

Russia on Thursday warned Turkey against deploying surface-to-air Patriot missiles to protect its troubled border with Syria, saying it should instead use its influence to help broker peace in the war-torn country.

"The militarization of the Syrian-Turkish border is of course a worrying sign," foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told a briefing.

Thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon are urgently seeking temporary shelter similar to the camps set up in Turkey and Jordan, but with its troubled history of refugees, Beirut and the U.N. reject the idea.

"If no camp or emergency solution is provided, families will end up sleeping on the streets, or returning to Syria," said Ayman al-Hariri, a Syrian activist in Lebanon's northern province of Akkar, where tens of thousands of refugees are currently based.

At least 40,000 people have been killed in violence across Syria since the outbreak of an anti-regime revolt in March last year, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Thursday.

"At least 28,026 civilians, 1,379 defectors, 10,150 soldiers and 574 unidentified people have been killed in Syria in the past 20 months," said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Rebel fighters seized the town of Mayadeen in eastern Syria on Thursday, a monitoring group said, adding that a large area on the Syrian-Iraqi border is now under control of insurgents.

"The area east of the city of Deir Ezzor, on the Iraqi border, is now the largest area in the whole country that is out of army control," said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.