Attacks north of Baghdad on Monday, including a car bomb detonated by a suicide bomber, killed six people just days ahead of the 10-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The latest violence, which also comes with weeks ahead of the country's first elections in three years, will raise fresh questions about the capabilities of Iraq's security forces amid an apparent spike in unrest.

The United States will not oppose moves by some European nations to arm Syrian rebels battling President Bashar Assad, top U.S. diplomat John Kerry said Monday.

"President (Barack) Obama has made it clear that the United States does not stand in the way of other countries that have made a decision to provide arms, whether it's France or Britain or others," Kerry told reporters.

NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted Monday that the military alliance had no intention of getting dragged into an EU debate about whether or not to supply arms to the Syrian rebels.

"This issue is a European Union question ... I have no intention whatsoever to interfere with this discussion within the EU," Rasmussen told a press conference.

The Palestinian Authority has urged the world to step up financial aid and press Israel to allow economic development, over fears of "political collapse" due to Israeli fiscal strangulation.

"We call on the international community to... pressure the government of Israel to release our revenues and to provide the financial support required to maintain basic functions and services," said a Palestinian Authority report seen by Agence France Presse on Monday.

The United Nations defended its humanitarian work in Syria on Monday, saying it deals with all parties in a "neutral and transparent manner" and offers assistance to all those affected by the conflict.

Radhouane Nouicer, the regional coordinator for the U.N.'S OCHA humanitarian affairs office, said the organisation was working under tough conditions and repeated a call for additional funding.

Syria's rebel chief said in Istanbul on Monday that the mainstream rebel Free Syrian Army wants an interim government to administer the whole of Syria and not just the areas freed from regime forces.

The demand came as the main opposition Syrian National Coalition met in Turkey to select an interim prime minister and government for large swathes of territory in the strife-torn country that have slipped out of President Bashar Assad's hands.

More than 6,800 women and children have been killed in two years of fighting in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said on Monday, putting the total toll at around 59,000 dead.

That figure is lower than the roughly 70,000 people that the United Nations says it believes have been killed since Syrian opposition activists began an uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Israel must immediately begin withdrawing its settlers from the Palestinian territories, a U.N. expert told diplomats Monday, even as the new Israeli government appeared set to strengthen the hand of the Jewish settler lobby.

Israel must "immediately and without preconditions cease the settlement activity and to initiate a process of withdrawal from the settlements," Christine Chanet told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, lamenting a "rampant annexation" of Palestinian territories.

Syrian regime forces resumed shelling parts of Damascus on Monday as security forces carried out arrests of students in housing attached to Damascus University, a monitoring group said.

"There is shelling of the areas of Maadaniya (south) and Jubar (east) by regime forces," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, reporting sniper fire and casualties in the city's northern Barzeh district as well.

At least eight people were killed Monday by a car bomb in central Mogadishu in one of the bloodiest attacks in the war-ravaged capital in recent months, police said.

Security sources added that a top intelligence official was the target of the attack, and that he was wounded in the blast, although there was no immediate official confirmation.