Syria closed one of its border gates with Turkey and barred Turkish citizens from entering Syria following bloody clashes in the city of Qamishli, Anatolia news agency reported on Saturday.

Turks were not allowed to cross into Syria from the border gate in Nusaybin city in southeast Turkey, which is only a few kilometers (miles) away from Qamishli, the local governor Murat Girgin told Anatolia.

Eight Syrians were shot dead on Friday as thousands of people rallied against the regime of President Bashar Assad and in support of a newly formed opposition front, activists said.

The fresh surge of violence came as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Assad will have to give up power if he fails to implement reforms acceptable to the opposition, and the Syrian regime again blamed "terrorists" for the unrest.

Turkey has agreed to extend by one year its command of NATO peacekeepers in the Afghan capital of Kabul, the foreign ministry said on Friday.

Turkey had taken over the Kabul regional command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) for one year on November 1, 2009 after an eight-month stint in 2007.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged Turkey on Friday to recognize the World War I-era massacres of Armenians as genocide within a "very brief" period before his term ends in May 2012.

"From 1915 to 2011, it seems to be enough (time) for reflection," Sarkozy told reporters in Yerevan on the second day of his visit to Armenia.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday urged Turkey to take responsibility for the 1915 massacre of Armenians, calling its refusal to recognize the deaths as genocide as "unacceptable".

Sarkozy's comments, issued at the start of his first state visit to Armenia, whose diaspora represents a large voting minority in France, come months before a presidential election which he heads into with approval ratings at a low.

An official source at the Syrian Foreign Ministry denied on Thursday media reports that a meeting was recently held between President Bashar Assad and Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, labeling them as untrue, reported the state news agency SANA.

The source said that the last meeting between the two officials took place in August, adding “no messages were conveyed from or to anyone during the meeting.”

Turkey will continue searching for gas and oil in the Mediterranean waters, where the rival Cyprus government has already started drilling, the Turkish energy minister said.

"We will not leave the Mediterranean. There are zones that we had spotted earlier," Energy Minister Taner Yildiz was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency on Thursday.

Israel is a "threat" to its region because it owns nuclear weapons, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.

"I right now see Israel as a threat for its region, because it has the atomic bomb," Erdogan was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency, during an official visit to South Africa.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his government would announce a package of sanctions against neighboring Syria despite a U.N. resolution blocked by Russia and China.

"Unfortunately, the draft prepared in the form of a warning (against Syria) was vetoed during the vote at the U.N. Security Council yesterday," Erdogan was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.

Turkish police on Tuesday detained over 140 people with suspected links to Kurdish rebels in three main cities, media reports said.

Police early Tuesday morning arrested 90 people in Istanbul after raiding several addresses around the city, Anatolia news agency reported.