NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged Syria Thursday to find a political solution to the country's crisis and warned against any new incidents with Turkey after a plane was shot down.

"I would expect that the Syrian authorities will do all they can to avoid any escalation and any such unacceptable incident as we saw when they shot down a Turkish aircraft," Rasmussen told a joint news conference with Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa in Ljubljana.

Up to 5,000 Syrians have sought refuge in Jordan over the past week from the bloodshed in their country, in a possible prelude to a large-scale influx, the U.N. refugee agency said on Thursday.

"Around 4,000 to 5,000 have crossed the borders this week, which is a large number," the UNHCR representative in Jordan, Andrew Harper, told Agence France Presse. "More and more people are likely to be coming to the kingdom."

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said on Thursday that a Yemen-style power transfer was unlikely in Syria because its President Bashar Assad would refuse to step down.

"Personally I think the Yemeni model would not succeed in Syria. In Yemen, there were supporters of that model, but it is not the case in Syria," Zebari told reporters.

Syrian President Bashar Assad insisted he enjoyed popular support in his own country and said foreign intervention was mainly to blame for the conflict, in an interview published Thursday.

"At the end of the day, we are human too," he told the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet.

WikiLeaks said Thursday it was publishing over two million emails from Syrian political figures dating back to 2006 but also covering the period of the crackdown on dissent by Syria's regime.

"Just now... WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria files, more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies dating from August 2006 to March 2012," said Sarah Harrison, spokeswoman for the anti-secrecy website.

The chief U.N. military observer in Syria, Major General Robert Mood, said on Thursday that he is opposed to his 300-strong team being armed.

"I've made it quite clear, from my point of view, that to give a small observer force weapons is not a good option," Mood told a press conference in the Syrian capital.

Gunmen have shot dead a Syrian general and two other senior officers in a day of violence that resulted in nearly 100 deaths across the country, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Thursday.

The general was killed on Wednesday on the road from Damascus to the Druze region of Suweida in the south, and a colonel was murdered in the central province of Hama.

A Syrian general and a number of soldiers defected and crossed into Turkey on Wednesday, the 15th such high-ranking officer to flee the conflict-wracked nation, a Turkish diplomat said.

A total of 66 people fled into Turkey from Syria on Wednesday, including the general and two colonels as well as soldiers and their families, the diplomat told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

Britain and France Wednesday said there could be no political transition in Syria with President Bashar Assad and urged Russia to stop backing its traditional ally.

The comments by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius came after world powers agreed in Geneva on Saturday on a plan for transition in Syria.

Syrian troops pounded several districts of the central city of Homs on Wednesday and clashed with rebels as at least 48 people were killed in violence across the country, activists and a watchdog said.

Regime forces killed 12 people in Daraa, nine in the countryside around Damascus, eight in Idlib, seven in Aleppo, five in Deir Ezzor, three in Homs, two in Damscus, one in Latakia and one in Hama, the opposition Local Coordination Committees reported.