European and Arab nations want a U.N. Security Council vote next week on a resolution condemning Syria's crackdown on protests and hinting at sanctions, diplomats said Tuesday.

Britain, France, Germany and Arab nations are working on the resolution which could face Russian opposition because of a call on all states to follow Arab League sanctions against President Bashar al-Assad.

Britain, France and the United States on Tuesday condemned Russia's arms sales to Syria which they said was fueling President Bashar al-Assad's deadly crackdown on protests.

Britain's U.N. ambassador Mark Lyall-Grant called the Russian weapons sales "irresponsible," at a Security Council debate on the Middle East.

Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Tuesday that France would not give in to "panic" and pull its troops out of Afghanistan this year after four of its soldiers were killed there last week.

"When I hear talk of an immediate withdrawal, such as at the end of 2012, I am not sure that this has been thought through and studied," he told the French parliament.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday slammed as discriminatory and racist a bill passed by the French Senate making denial of the Armenian genocide a crime.

"The proposal adopted in France is tantamount to discrimination, racism and violates freedom of thought," Erdogan said in the parliament during an address to his fellow deputies.

Opposition figure Georges Sabra has left Syria for France where he told the Liberation daily that "the Syrian people deserve to be protected by the U.N."

"My party sent me here to help the SNC (Syrian National Council, the country's largest opposition group), to work as a team," the head of the Democratic People's Party told Liberation's Tuesday edition

Prime Minister Najib Miqati will head to Paris on February 10 on a three-day visit to meet with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and PM Francois Fillon, An Nahar newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Beirut and Paris have set the date for Miqati’s official visit to Paris, who will discuss the latest developments in the region and Lebanon, the bilateral ties and the future of the United Nations Interim Force in the South, the daily said.

French senators have passed a bill outlawing the denial of Armenian genocide in 1915, with a seething Turkey slamming the move and warning of consequences while Armenia hailed a day "written in gold."

The French Senate on Monday approved, by 127 votes to 86, the measure which threatens with jail anyone in France who denies that the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turk forces amounted to genocide.

French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said on Monday he had ordered a domestic Islamist group to disband, accusing it of training its members for "armed struggle".

Speaking on a visit to Mantes-la-Jolie in northwestern France, Gueant said: "It is unacceptable in our country that groups train people for armed struggle, for any opportunity for anti-establishment terrorism to present itself."

Turkey's foreign minister says his country will implement a new set of measures against France if its Senate passes a bill making it a crime to deny that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was a genocide.

Ahmet Davutoglu did not spell out the measures Turkey would take in response to the bill that will be debated Monday in the French Senate.

An Afghan soldier who shot dead four French troops has said he did it because of a recent video showing U.S. Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban insurgents, security sources told Agence France Presse.

The attack on the soldiers, who were unarmed, came on Friday at a base in eastern Afghanistan and left 15 other French troops wounded, eight of them seriously.