Forces loyal to President Bashar Assad reclaimed control of the central village of Dabaa on Thursday, Syrian state television said, a day after the army and Hizbullah captured a rebel bastion.

"Our heroic armed forces have secured and stabilized the town of Dabaa, north of Qusayr," the broadcaster said.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called for national reconciliation with Gaza's Hamas rulers on Thursday, after the swearing-in of a new government in the West Bank.

"I want to overcome the obstacles on the path to... establishing an independent Palestinian state," he told the first meeting of the new government headed by prime minister Rami Hamdallah.

Jordanian border guards on Thursday foiled an attempt to smuggle a large haul of weapons from Syria into the kingdom, the army said.

"The border guards arrested a group of people at dawn on Thursday as they tried to smuggle a large amount of weapons from Syria into Jordan," state-run Petra news agency quoted an army statement as saying.

Some 200 Russian Islamists who back North Caucasus insurgents are fighting in Syria for al-Qaida, the head of the Russian security service (FSB) said Thursday, Russian news agencies reported.

"The fact that around 200 fighters from Russia are fighting on the side of the Caucasus Emirate under the flag of al-Qaida and other related structures provokes concern in Russia," the head of the FSB Alexander Bortnikov said at an international security forum in the central Russian city of Kazan.

Scores of homes in central Syria's Qusayr are razed to the ground, its shops are smashed, and the smell of gunpowder still hangs heavy in the air.

After Syrian troops and Hizbullah took control of the symbolic insurgent bastion on Wednesday, Qusayr has become a ghost town, a witness told Agence France Presse.

Yemeni authorities released on Thursday 17 of 58 political activists held since the 2011 uprising against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, an Agence France Presse correspondent witnessed in Sanaa.

As they came out of the central prison's compound, youth activists who have been pressing for their release raised their hands chanting: "Revolt, revolt -- it will go on."

Al-Qaida militants are holding a South African couple abducted last month in Yemen's central city of Taiz, a top security official said on Thursday, adding that investigations are not "very encouraging."

"It's almost confirmed that the two South Africans are now held by al-Qaida men," the official told Agence France Presse.

A hot air balloon accident that killed 19 tourists in Egypt was caused by the "grave" pilot error that caused a gas leakage, a police forensic report has found.

The interior ministry report blamed the manager of the hot air balloon port and the pilot for the February 26 accident that killed the Asian and European tourists.

Three bombings in Baghdad, including a car bomb in a market, killed five people Thursday, the latest in a surge in Iraq violence that has sparked fears of a revival of all-out sectarian war.

Twin roadside bombs in southwest Baghdad killed three people, while a car bomb in a market in the capital's southeast killed two others, security and medical officials said.

Austria will withdraw its troops from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Golan Heights, the government said Thursday, after Syrian rebels briefly seized a crossing on the Israel-Syria ceasefire line.

"In light of this, the defense minister said that... the Austrian army's participation in the UNDOF mission can no longer be maintained for military reasons," Chancellor Werner Faymann and Vice-Chancellor Michael Spindelegger said in a statement.