Some 500 Kurdish rebels have been killed over the past month by Turkish security forces, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday.

"In operations held during the past month, some 500 terrorists were rendered ineffective in the (southeast) region," Erdogan said in remarks televised by NTV news channel.

The foreign ministers of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey are to hold their first high-level meeting on the Syria conflict on Monday in Cairo, Iran's official news agency IRNA reported.

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi was also to speak with Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi in a separate bilateral meeting during his visit to Cairo, it added.

Eight police officers died and nine were wounded in a roadside mine blast Sunday blamed on Kurdish rebels in Turkey's southeast, local security sources said.

The members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) launched the attack around 0715 GMT Sunday as a police vehicle was passing in the Karliova district of Bingol province, the sources said.

Hollywood star Angelina Jolie met Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on Saturday to discuss measures to care for Syrian refugees in Iraq, the foreign ministry said.

They discussed "the situation of Syrian refugees in Iraq and steps taken by the Iraqi government to ensure a decent life for them," the ministry said.

Four Turkish soldiers have been killed and 75 Kurdish rebels have been "rendered ineffective" in the operation launched on September 8 in the rebel strongholds near the Iraqi border, the local governor's office told the Anatolia news agency.

The operation has been concentrated in the Semdinli district and has included nearly 5,000 ground troops backed by air power, according to the army.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad was nearing its "inevitable" end despite violence threatening the entire region.

"Assad's regime is approaching its inevitable end," Erdogan said in comments translated into Russian at a conference in the Ukrainian Black Sea resort of Yalta.

Hollywood star and U.N. special envoy Angelina Jolie on Thursday visited Turkey's largest camp for Syrian refugees near the border, where overjoyed thousands welcomed her, Turkish media reported.

Jolie, accompanied by U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonia Guterres, met with some of the 12,000 refugees at Oncupinar camp in southeastern Kilis city, which lies right on the border with their conflict-wracked homeland.

Gunmen kidnapped a Turkish tourist bus driver in southern Yemen on Wednesday to apply pressure on the authorities to release a fellow tribesman, an official in Abyan province said.

He said the driver, returning with his empty vehicle from Mukala, the capital of Hadramaut province, was intercepted in the Abyan town of Shakla.

U.N. refugee agency's special envoy and actress Angelina Jolie arrived in Lebanon on Wednesday to visit the Syrians who fled the turmoil in their country.

Jolie expressed concern for the alarming humanitarian situation the Syrians are passing through.

Growing tensions and fears of separatism prompted communist Bulgaria to orchestrate an ethnic purge against its Turkish minority in 1989, newly published archive documents showed this week.

On May 29, 1989, Bulgaria opened its Iron Curtain border with Turkey -- sealed until then -- and urged Ankara to follow suit and accept part of its 750,000-strong Turkish minority.