The timing of the next Syria talks in Geneva was thrown into doubt on Friday after the U.N. said it could not confirm a Russian announcement that they had been postponed. 

The coming together of several factions of Syrian rebels against the country's former al-Qaida affiliate has upped the ante against the jihadists following their exclusion from peace talks.

Egyptian authorities prevented a prominent lawyer under investigation for receiving foreign funding from leaving the country on Thursday, in the latest travel ban for a regime critic.

A Saudi writer has been sentenced to seven years in prison for offenses including having contact with foreign journalists, a rights group said Thursday, part of what activists call "an intensified crackdown."

Israel will take in 100 Syrian orphans despite the two countries officially being at war, the interior ministry said Thursday, in the first such move since the uprising began in Syria.

Turkey on Thursday said it would watch closely new US President Donald Trump's reported interest in setting up safe zones in Syria to house refugees, an idea that Ankara has pushed for months.

US media reported earlier Thursday that the Pentagon would be given 90 days to draw up a plan to set up "safe zones" in or near Syria where refugees from the nation's civil war can shelter.

Human Rights Watch criticised Kuwait on Thursday for ending a moratorium on executions by hanging seven people, saying the action was part of a worrying regional rise in use of the death penalty.

"Kuwait's killing of seven people on January 25 highlights the alarming trend in the region for countries to return to or increasingly use the death penalty," said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East director.

Police in Bahrain carried out a dawn raid Thursday against supporters of a Shiite cleric on trial in the Sunni-ruled kingdom during which one man was shot and wounded, witnesses said.

Forces loyal to Libyan Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar battling jihadists around second city Benghazi said Wednesday they had taken one of the last remaining strongholds of the militants.

Haftar's self-declared Libyan National Army (LNA) "liberated all of Qanfouda", an area 15 kilometres (nine miles) west of the centre of Benghazi, spokesman Ahmed al-Mesmari posted on Facebook.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Wednesday that Egypt was "on the right track" six years after the uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak.