Syrian opposition leader Burhan Ghalioun on Sunday said he stood ready to hand over the chairmanship of the Syrian National Council (SNC) to others to broaden its appeal.

The SNC is supposed to appoint a new chairman every three months, but Ghalioun has remained leader since the council was set up in October 2011 because of lack of agreement over a successor.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat on Sunday stressed “the need to reach a political solution to the problem” in unrest-hit Tripoli that would “spare the army a confrontation on Tripoli and keep it away from political disputes,” warning of “traps set up by the Syrian regime.”

According to a statement issued by the PSP, Jumblat contacted several security and political officials, urging “the release of Mr. Shadi al-Mawlawi and the addressing of the situation according to the legal norms, to prevent the recurrence of illegal arrests by sides that lack jurisdiction.”

The March 14 forces on Sunday called on the government to take care of the residents of Arsal and the Bekaa and the Syrian refugees in the area, urging an “immediate intervention to put an end to the violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty by the Syrian regime’s army.”

“From here we say to whomever it concerns that we demand the government to immediately take care of the residents of Arsal and the Bekaa and to heed the situation of the families that had fled from Syria by providing their needs through the Higher Relief Commission,” March 14 General-Secretariat Coordinator Fares Soaid said in Arsal, during a visit at the head of an opposition delegation.

The head of the dissident Free Syrian Army charged in remarks published Sunday that al-Qaida has links with the powerful airforce intelligence of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

"If al-Qaida militants have indeed entered the country, it happened with the cooperation of that agency," FSA chief, Colonel Riyadh al-Asaad, told Kuwait's Al-Rai newspaper.

Fighting between Syrian regime forces and armed rebels and deadly raids killed nine people Sunday, including seven civilians, as a tenuous U.N.-backed ceasefire entered its second month, monitors and activists said.

The fresh bloodshed and clashes came as the U.N. mission in Syria said it now has 176 military observers on the ground, more than half its planned strength of 300.

Turkey's ambassador to Syria said on Saturday the people of that country were being "fed with fears" about their fate should Bashar Assad's regime fall.

Speaking at the Lennart Meri Conference in the Estonian capital Tallinn, ambassador Omer Onhon decried conditions for the majority of Syrians, who he said have been led to believe the only alternative to Assad's authoritarian regime is civil war and religious radicalization.

Al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group unknown before the Syrian revolt, released a video on Saturday claiming responsibility for twin suicide bombings in Damascus that killed 55 people.

The video says the Thursday bombings, the deadliest since the uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime erupted in March 2011, were "in response to regime bombing of residential areas in Damascus, Idlib, Hama, Daraa provinces and others."

Violence in Syria cost at least 10 lives on Saturday as a U.N force to oversee a truce neared half its planned .strength, monitors said.

In Idlib province, a stronghold near the Turkish border of rebels fighting President Bahar Assad's regime, security force gunfire killed a man and a woman during a series of raids, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Two Turkish journalists who were detained for two months in Syria are on their way home following mediation by Iran, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced Saturday.

"I have just spoken with Iranian Foreign Minister (Ali Akbar) Salehi. Our two journalists, Adem Ozkose and Hamit Coskun, about whom we had no news since they left for Syria, are on their way to Tehran now," Davutoglu said on Twitter.

Members of the Free Syrian Army abducted overnight two Lebanese citizens and a Syrian national, reported Voice of Lebanon radio on Saturday.

Khodr Hussein Jaafar, Ahmed Medlij, and Syrian Abdullah al-Zein were kidnapped for their alleged role in persecuting Syrian opposition members in Syria, reported the daily al-Mustaqbal on Saturday.