U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Turkey next Saturday for talks on the conflict in Syria, a State Department spokeswoman said.

"Clinton goes to Istanbul for bilateral consultations with the Turkish government on Syria as well as to cover other timely issues," the spokeswoman told reporters in the Malawian capital Lilongwe.

The opposition Syrian National Council said on Sunday that the army was hitting key public institutions in its bombardment of rebel fighters in commercial capital Aleppo, some of historical significance.

"After failing to subdue (rebel forces) in Aleppo... the Syrian regime's gangs have started to target government institutions and buildings," the exiled opposition group said in a statement.

Hundreds of people rallied in Australia on Sunday in support of the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad, urging no intervention by foreign powers in the conflict.

Organized by a group calling itself "Hands off Syria", the demonstration began with a short rally of several hundred people at Sydney's town hall but numbers swelled as the group, many of them families, marched through the city.

Syrian regime warplanes pounded rebel positions in second city Aleppo on Sunday ahead of a threatened ground assault by more than 20,000 troops assembled around the commercial capital.

A high-level security official said Syria's army completed its deployment of reinforcements to the northern city of Aleppo, ready for a decisive showdown.

Iran has reached out to Turkey and Qatar to ask for their help in freeing 48 Iranian pilgrims being held in Syria after kidnappers stormed their bus in Damascus, state media reported on Sunday.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi telephoned his Turkish and Qatari counterparts, Ahmet Davutoglu and Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir Al-Thani, late Saturday to request their assistance, the state television website reported.

Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalili is scheduled to visit Lebanon on Monday where he is expected to meet with a number of senior officials, various media reports said on Sunday.

The pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat stated that the talks will focus on the developments in Syria, with some sources describing his meetings as “crisis talks” given the escalation of events in the neighboring country.

The 14 Syrians, who were deported by the Lebanese authorities, were released on Saturday amid reports saying that one of them returned back to Lebanon.

Al-Jadeed television station said that the Syrian authorities released the 14 men.

Israeli soldiers shot and wounded a Syrian man trying to breach a frontier fence in the southern Golan with a pair of wire cutters on Saturday, a military spokeswoman said.

Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich said Israeli forces "identified a civilian from Syria, a man approaching the border fence. The man was holding hydraulic cutters and tried to cut the fence.

Arab states will not accept a new international envoy to Syria after Kofi Annan's resignation unless his or her mandate is to clearly negotiate a transfer of power, Qatar's prime minister said on Saturday.

"Arab nations will not accept a new envoy with the same mandate that was given to Annan," Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani told Al-Jazeera of the outgoing U.N. and Arab League envoy, whose six-point plan for peace was never implemented.

The International Committee of the Red Cross Saturday appealed to all parties in the conflict in Syria to respect international humanitarian law as the violence endangers more civilians.

"We urge all parties involved in the fighting to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law," said Robert Mardini, the ICRC's head of operations for the Near and Middle East, in a statement.