Hardline former top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili was on Thursday appointed to Iran's top political arbitration body, the Expediency Council, state television reported.

The appointment was made by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to whom the council provides advice on different national issues.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday cast doubt on a proposal to secure Syria's chemical weapons, saying the Syrian government should not be trusted and is only seeking to stave off an international intervention.

Erdogan said that Damascus has "violated all of its promises in order to buy more time to continue massacring people, and it will continue to do so."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday said there was still "a chance for peace" in Syria as he prepared for high-stakes talks with his U.S. counterpart on a plan for Damascus to give up its chemical weapons.

Before leaving for the talks in Geneva, Lavrov said during a visit to Kazakhstan that he was prepared to "ensure Syria's adherence to the chemical weapon ban convention," which would include the country's total disclosure of its chemical arms sites.

Italian police said Thursday they had arrested the crew of a ship carrying more than 200 refugees believed to be from Syria, boarding and detaining the vessel in international waters in the first operation of its kind.

"This is the first capture carried out in international waters to implement international conventions... to detain and inspect a ship not flying a national flag," the police said in a statement.

Syrian families affected by the country's civil war need $1.4 billion (1.05 billion euros) in aid, a senior Syrian official said Thursday, adding that only 43 percent of that was being met.

"Humanitarian aid is dispensed according to the resources available, but there's a deficit of 57 percent," media quoted Administration Minister Omar Ghalwanji as saying.

The European Parliament on Thursday urged a "clear, strong, targeted and united" international response, including "deterrent measures" if needed, to the chemical weapons attack that left hundreds dead in Syria last month.

In a resolution, the parliament noted that "different sources seem to indicate" the Syrian regime was behind the August 21 attack which if proven "is a flagrant breach of international law, a war crime and crime against humanity."

Syrian troops were pursuing small groups of rebels inside the historic Christian town of Maalula Thursday, a security source in Damascus said.

"The army continues to advance in Maalula to defeat the armed men," the source told AFP on condition of anonymity, describing "pockets of resistance," including snipers, inside the town.

A Sanaa court on Thursday cleared five Saudi nationals on charges of joining an Al-Qaida plot to attack Yemen's security forces but jailed two of them for entering the country illegally.

The five, arrested in June, faced charges of plotting, "in association with an armed group belonging to Al-Qaida to carry out criminal acts against members of the security forces in Yemen," official media reported earlier this month.

A spate of attacks across Iraq killed seven people on Thursday, including three who died when a suicide car bomber struck as recruits were leaving a military base, officials said.

The attacks come amid Iraq's worst bloodshed since 2008, with more than 4,000 people killed already this year.

Washington called Thursday on the Syrian regime to quickly declare the scope and size of its chemical weapons stockpile as Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Geneva for high-stakes talks.

A senior U.S. official said the aim for the talks with Russia was "to see if in fact we can test whether there is a credible and authentic way forward here, that the Russians mean what they say... and probably more importantly that Assad means what he says."