The European Union slapped fresh sanctions against President Bashar Assad's regime Monday, agreeing an assets freeze and travel ban on 28 Syrians and two firms at a meeting of EU foreign ministers.

This 19th round of sanctions since the start of the Syrian conflict in March last year brings to 181 the number of people and to 54 the number of companies blacklisted by the EU.

The number of Syrians fleeing the conflict in their homeland and seeking refuge in Turkey now exceeds 100,000, a Turkish disaster agency said on Monday.

Turkey is home to 100,363 refugees housed in several camps in the southeast along the Syrian border, the AFAD disaster agency said in a statement.

At least eight soldiers were killed in clashes with rebels at a military checkpoint near the battleground northern city of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday, as the Local Coordination Committees said regime forces killed 30 people across the country.

Aleppo, which has been the theater of intense conflict for the past three months, was rocked by a bomb at dawn while a string of rebel-held neighborhoods were bombarded by the army, the Britain-based watchdog said.

Turkey's Europe minister Monday called on Europe to do more to help his country tackle the more than 100,000 refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria, accusing the bloc of being fixated on its debt crisis.

In an interview with German daily Die Welt, Egemen Bagis said: "Europe should start thinking about the people who have fled Syria into Turkey."

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi called Monday for a ceasefire in Syria during the upcoming four-day Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, as the revolt entered its 20th month with a death toll of more than 33,000.

Brahimi made his call as he shuttled between Syria's neighbors, which have been bitterly divided by the conflict along the confessional lines that have traditionally riven the Islamic world.

Europe's foreign ministers will sharply ramp up the pressure on Iran and Syria at talks Monday, while taking a "big step" in Africa by agreeing to assist Mali reconquer its north from rebels and Islamist extremists.

Meeting days before a European Union summit, the bloc's 27 foreign ministers are tipped to agree what a diplomatic source dubbed "one of the toughest packages of sanctions" yet against Tehran over its disputed nuclear program.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Sunday gave visiting U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi a proposal aimed at ending the conflict in key regional ally Syria.

Salehi said Tehran had "handed its unofficial detailed proposal in writing aimed at solving the Syrian crisis" to Brahimi as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, in comments broadcast on Arabic-language Al-Alam television.

Dozens of corpses have been found in a hospital morgue in the Syrian province of Damascus, a monitoring group said, adding the circumstances of the deaths were not immediately clear.

"We know they were shot dead, most likely during clashes with the army," said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Two Lebanese nationals were killed in an armed attack in the Syrian town of Rableh on the border with Lebanon, state-run National News Agency reported on Sunday, after Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said Friday that around 30,000 Lebanese residents live in 23 Syrian border towns and 12 farms in the frontier region.

Lebanese citizens "Abdo Yaacoub al-Ahmar, who was born in the Hermel town of al-Shawaghir in 1920, and Taifallah Nicola Atiyyeh, 53, were transported from Syrian territory for treatement in Lebanon via the Lebanese border town of Hawsh al-Sayyed Ali after they sustained severe wounds in an armed attack on the town of Rableh. However, they succumbed to their wounds a short time later," NNA said.

The head of the Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc MP Fouad Saniora accused on Sunday Hizbullah of following Iran's bidding through its recent sending of an unmanned drone to fly over Israel.

He said during a seminar in the southern city of Sidon: “Hizbullah is dragging Lebanon towards military operations and a possible Israeli retaliation that the country has not been consulted over.”