Iraq on Tuesday grounded and inspected a second Iranian aircraft bound for Syria in as many days, but found only humanitarian materiel, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's spokesman said.

The back-to-back searches come after Baghdad said last month it would step up such inspections, after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry publicly accused Iraq of turning a blind eye to Iranian flights which Washington says carry military equipment for the Damascus regime.

Iraq on Tuesday marks a decade since U.S.-led forces took control of Baghdad, sealing the ouster of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime, but the country remains plagued by deadly attacks and mired in political crises.

Remembered the world over for the iconic images of Iraqis pulling down a statue of Saddam in central Baghdad's Firdos Square -- helped in no small part by an American military unit -- the fall of the capital is a far more emotive day in Iraq than the anniversary of the invasion itself weeks earlier.

A coordinated attack involving a suicide bomber at an open-air election campaign meeting in central Iraq killed 25 people on Saturday, the latest in a spike in unrest two weeks before provincial polls.

The assault raises further questions over the credibility of the election, Iraq's first since 2010, and comes some 10 years after the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein and aimed to usher in a stable democracy but instead unleashed brutal violence which continues to plague the country.

Top U.S. military officer General Martin Dempsey arrived in Afghanistan on an unannounced visit Saturday to assess the level of training the U.S. will need to provide Afghan forces after NATO withdraws in 2014, an official said.

An estimated 100,000 foreign troops have been fighting the Taliban for the past 11 years and are due to leave Afghanistan by December 31, 2014 to be replaced by a smaller contingent to train and advise their local counterparts.

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter warned Friday that deadly religious violence in Myanmar was undermining the country's hard-won democratic reforms.

At least 43 people were killed in Buddhist-Muslim unrest in central Myanmar last month, marring international optimism about the nation's emergence from decades of military rule.

The Pentagon warned Pyongyang on Friday that "further provocative action would be regrettable" after reports that North Korea had deployed two mid-range missiles near its eastern coast.

"Missile tests outside their international obligations would be a provocative act. They need to follow international norms and abide by their commitments," Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters.

North Korea has no choice but to "confront" the United States which is to blame for tensions in the Korean peninsula, a top Iranian commander said in remarks carried on Friday by Fars news agency.

"Tensions in the region are due to excessive demands by the United States... and its tightening of the noose on North Korea," said armed forces deputy chief Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri.

A Dutch court on Friday halted the extradition of a Dutch-Pakistani al-Qaida suspect to the United States, saying he would not be handed over until Washington guaranteed the same treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder as in the Netherlands.

The Hague judge "prohibits the State to extradite Sabir Khan as long as the United States cannot guarantee," that Khan, 26, gets a very specific type of treatment for his disorder, commonly referred to as PTSD, said a court document sent to Agence France Presse.

Japan and the United States on Friday agreed on a plan that will see some land occupied by the U.S. military returned to the islands in a bid to break the deadlock in a long-stalled deal.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. Ambassador John Roos issued a joint statement on the agreement, under which five U.S. military facilities and other areas on Okinawa's main island will return to Japan over the coming years.

Iran will insist that its right to enrich uranium is recognized in talks this week with world powers on its disputed nuclear drive, Tehran's chief negotiator said Thursday.

"We think that they can open up tomorrow's (Friday's) talks with one phrase -- and that is to accept Iran's right, particularly its right to enrich," Saeed Jalili said in a speech at an Almaty university ahead of the negotiations in the Kazakh city.