Syria has asked Tunisia and Libya to close their embassies in Damascus in a tit-for-tat move after they both expelled Syria's envoys, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Saturday.

"Syrian authorities have asked Libya and Tunisia to close their embassies in Damascus in a reciprocal move," Jihad Makdisi told reporters.

Tunisian Industry Minister Mohamed Lamine Chakhari is in talks with German company Leoni to ward off the closure of a plant in Tunisia that employs some 2,700 people, the ministry said Saturday.

Chakhari went late Friday to Mateur, some 60 kilometers northwest of Tunis, to call for "dialogue ... leading to solutions that take into consideration the future of the business," the ministry said in a communique.

Tunisia's new President Moncef Marzouki arrived in Morocco Wednesday to push for a revival of a dormant project to unify the Maghreb region on his first foreign tour since taking office.

"This year we will work to restore unity with our brothers in Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Mauritania, with the aim of resuscitating the great dream of a Union of the Maghreb which has been frozen for years," he told the official Moroccan news agency MAP.

Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali called Sunday on all countries to cut off diplomatic relations with Syria over the violence there.

"We have to expel Syrian ambassadors from Arab and other countries," Jebali said during a panel discussion on the Middle East at a security conference in the southern German city of Munich.

Tunisia will expel the Syrian ambassador and stop recognizing the Damascus regime as government after a violent repression that killed over 200 people in the central city of Homs, the presidency said.

"Tunisia has begun formal procedures to expel the Syrian ambassador and to end all recognition of the regime in power in Syria," said the presidency in a statement.

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde vowed Thursday to support Tunisia and urged its new leaders to focus their efforts on job creation to win back investor confidence.

"The IMF in 2012 is not what it used to be in the eighties and is now a partner that will always be ready to support Tunisia if and when it needs it," Lagarde told reporters in Tunis.

Thousands of Tunisians angered by the increasing prominence of ultra-conservative Islamists in a country only recently freed from dictatorial rule took to the streets in protest Saturday.

An Agence France Presse correspondent estimated several thousand activists, professors, artists and other demonstrators flooded the streets of the nation's capital, including along Bourguiba Avenue, a well-known thoroughfare that became a center for dissent during protests that led to the ouster of dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali a year ago.

Human Rights Watch urged world powers to support the rights of Arab Spring protesters to build real democracies after they ousted long-time strongmen once backed by the West, in its annual report Sunday.

"Many democracies have allowed their ties with repressive allies to temper their support for human rights in the Arab Spring protests," HRW said in its report, launched in Cairo just three days before the anniversary of the revolt that toppled president Hosni Mubarak.

Tunisia Saturday granted an amnesty or conditional release from prison to 9,000 detainees to mark the first anniversary of the fall of despot Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, officials said.

"On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Tunisian revolution the justice ministry has announced that 9,000 detainees will be pardoned or benefit from a conditional release," the justice ministry said in a statement.

Tunisia's ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali plans to take a complaint about the seizure of his property to a United Nations committee, his lawyer said Friday.

In a statement, Akram Azoury condemned "the illegal actions of the Tunisian authorities who have confiscated all the fixed and moveable assets of president Ben Ali, including his personal house," under a decree signed by then interim president Fouad Mebazaa last March 14.