A Turkish soldier who went missing on the border with Syria has been brought home, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced on Twitter on Monday.

"We've brought back to the country a short time ago our officer who was abducted while on a mission against smugglers on the border with Syria," Davutoglu said.

Turkey said Monday an agreement to train and equip thousands of moderate Syrian opposition fighters would be concluded later in January after several months of talks with the United States. 

The program is a key pillar of Turkish policy on Syria which aims to simultaneously pressure not only Islamist extremists but also the Damascus regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. and coalition aircraft on Sunday targeted a crude oil pipeline and collection depots in Syria held by Islamic State jihadists, the American military said, in the latest bid to undercut the group's oil smuggling. 

Allied fighter jets and bombers carried out 14 air raids near the eastern city of Dayr-az-Zawr since Sunday morning, including six strikes on five crude oil collection points, a pipeline, armored vehicles and a shipping container, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Hamas said Monday it was "totally opposed" to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's plans to re-submit to the U.N. Security Council a resolution on ending Israel's occupation which failed last week.

"Hamas is totally opposed to any return to the U.N. Security Council by the Palestinian Authority," spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement.

Thirteen Egyptian Christians held in Libya have been freed, a tribal leader said on Monday after government sources reported they had been abducted by Islamist militants.

However, Muftah Marzuq, head of the council of elders in the coastal city of Sirte, insisted that the 13 had not been kidnapped, but had been detained by people smugglers.

Iran arrested a "terrorist cell" accused of killing soldiers in a flashpoint border area and detained in a separate incident three Afghans planning to fight in Iraq, media reported Monday.

The cell members were caught near Sarbaz in the southeast, said a statement from Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) published by the official IRNA news agency.

The Islamic State jihadist group has executed eight people, four of them policemen, in Iraq's Salaheddin province, according to a series of pictures posted online.

A message that accompanied the pictures, the authenticity of which could not be independently confirmed, said the eight men had reneged on a pledge to stop working for the Iraqi government.

Kurdish fighters have seized the security and government district of Syria's Kobane from the Islamic State jihadist group and now control 80 percent of the border town, a monitoring group said Monday.

"The People's Protection Units (YPG) fighting the jihadists (IS) for nearly four months have full control of the security district," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The newly elected head of Syria's key opposition National Coalition on Monday ruled out taking part in a Russian-led bid for new talks to end the Syrian conflict.

Khaled Khoja, who was elected early on Monday to head the opposition grouping, said Moscow's proposal was impossible.

Libya's internationally recognized government on Monday appealed for weapons to combat militias which have seized parts of the oil-rich but conflict-wracked nation, at an emergency meeting of the Arab League.

"We call on the international community to assume its legal and moral responsibilities and to arm, without further delay, the Libyan army," said Libya's representative to the Cairo-based Arab League, Ashur Bou Rashed.