The death toll from Israel's latest bombardment of military targets in Syria rose from 11 to 21, a war monitor said Tuesday, adding that most of those killed were Iranian.

A suicide car bomb attack on a military convoy in northeastern Syria Monday killed five members of a Kurdish-led force accompanying U.S. troops in an anti-jihadist coalition, a monitor said.

Israeli jets struck a series of Iranian military targets in Syria early on Monday, the military said in a rare departure from its years-long policy of ambiguity regarding activities in neighboring war-torn Syria.

The military said the targets included munition storage facilities, an intelligence site and a military training camp. The strikes were in response to a surface-to-surface rocket that Iranian forces fired toward Israel on Sunday that was intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system over a ski resort in the Golan Heights. That followed a rare Israeli daylight air raid near the Damascus International Airport.

Turkey on Friday insisted Syrian regime forces should not be allowed in Manbij as US troops withdraw, as proposed by a US-backed Kurdish militia viewed as terrorists by Ankara.

The new U.N. envoy to Syria ended his first visit to the war-torn country Thursday, stressing the need for a U.N.-brokered political solution to the eight-year conflict.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Syria's regime must take control of the country's north, after calls from the US to set up a Turkish-controlled "security zone" in the area.

Syria's Kurds on Wednesday rejected a US proposal for a "security zone" under Turkish control along the Syrian side of the two countries' border.

The United Nations' new envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, arrived in Damascus on Tuesday on his first trip since being appointed, an AFP correspondent reported.

Qatar's foreign minister ruled out on Monday the possibility of re-opening an embassy in Damascus, in line with some other Gulf countries, calling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a war criminal.

The US military has begun moving non-essential gear out of Syria but is not withdrawing troops for now, defense officials said amid uncertainty over America's planned exit from the war-battered nation.