Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday stressed Syria’s “keenness on Lebanon’s stability” during a meeting in Damascus with Arab Tawhid Party leader Wiam Wahhab, the party’s media department said in a statement.

The two men discussed the situations in Lebanon and the Arab region during their “three-hour meeting,” the party added.

Eleven Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped on Wednesday in Syria, in the latest such incident in the unrest-swept Arab state, the state news agency IRNA reported.

It said the latest case raised to 29 the number of Iranians abducted in Syria since December. The foreign ministry has urged Damascus "to use all means ... to release" Iranian nationals.

The Syrian crisis that began as a peaceful revolt is quickly turning into a full-blown insurgency pitting an increasingly militarized opposition against a powerful regime bent on repression, analysts say.

"It is the beginning of an all-out armed conflict," said Joshua Landis, head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Russia will use its veto to block any U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria that it deems to be unacceptable, Moscow's envoy to the United Nations said on Wednesday, as Paris said Russia has now a "less negative" attitude towards a draft resolution proposed by the West and the Arab League.

"If the text is unacceptable then we will vote against," Vitaly Churkin was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.

Many points of contention were aired at a high-stakes U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria's bloodshed on Tuesday, but at least one came straight from another era -- Lawrence of Arabia.

Syria's U.N. representative brought up the famous British soldier from World War I as he defiantly rejected a draft resolution backed by other Arab states calling on President Bashar al-Assad to step down.

The March 14 General Secretariat praised on Wednesday the Syrian National Council’s open letter to the Lebanese people, saying that a free and independent Syria’s recognition of a sovereign Lebanon is the only way to rebuild solid Lebanese-Syrian ties based on trust and cooperation.

It said in a letter to the Syrian people: “Democratic change in Syria will mark an historic opportunity for its development and guarantee Lebanon’s independence.”

Iraq is to host an Arab summit on March 29, the first since the Arab Spring that swept away several dictators and brought Islamists to the fore, a senior Arab League official said on Wednesday.

The last time Baghdad hosted a regular summit of the 22-member organization dates back to November 1978, and Iraq was the venue for an extraordinary session in May 1990, just months before Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

France on Tuesday pressed Syrian authorities to shed light on the death of French television reporter Gilles Jacquier, who was killed as he covered the country's 10-month-old uprising.

Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, visiting the United Nations in a push for a resolution on Syria's bloodshed, said that a report by Arab League monitors was not definitive on the origin of the fire that killed 43-year-old journalist.

Qatar's prime minister, speaking on behalf of the Arab League, urged the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to take action to stop Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's "killing machine."

Opening a top-level Security Council meeting on the Syrian crisis, Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani said that the Arab League had tried to seek a solution with Assad in face of the 10-month uprising.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle called on Tuesday on the U.N. Security Council to act "urgently" on Syria, telling a Cairo news conference a strong text on the crisis was "absolutely important."

"The situation is unacceptable and it even became worse in the last couple of days," Westerwelle said after talks with his Egyptian counterpart Mohammed Amr.