Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will visit Stockholm next month after Sweden became the first major state of the European Union to recognize Palestine, the Swedish government announced Friday.

"The visit of president Abbas, by invitation from the prime minister, is confirmed for February 10," foreign ministry spokeswoman Ulla Jacobson told Agence France-Presse. "He will also meet the foreign minister, the king and the archbishop."

With their town liberated but largely destroyed by battles that drove Islamic State jihadists out, thousands of Syrian residents of Kobane are settling into Turkey's newest refugee camp for an indefinite stay.  

Opened on Sunday just several kilometres from the Syrian border, the new compound near the town of Suruc is the largest refugee camp yet in Turkey, and has begun taking in some of the estimated 200,000 people who fled Kobane after it came under IS attack in September.

The Islamic State group has shot down a Syrian regime warplane that was bombing opposition-held areas, killing the pilot, a monitoring group said on Friday.

Jihadists published photographs of the plane and the pilot's body on social media sites following the crash on Thursday night in Damascus province that was claimed by IS.

Jordan's military said on Friday that it was still awaiting proof that a warplane pilot threatened with execution by the Islamic State group is safe.

IS had vowed to kill F-16 airman Maaz al-Kassasbeh by sunset on Thursday unless Amman handed over an Iraqi female jihadist in return for captured Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.

The Islamic State jihadist group killed a senior Kurdish commander and five fighters Friday in a major attack in Iraq's Kirkuk province, while bombings elsewhere left at least nine dead.

The IS assault on areas south and west of the northern city of Kirkuk began at around midnight, sparking fighting with medium and heavy weapons that was still ongoing Friday morning, a police brigadier general said.

Israel on Friday published tenders to build 450 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank, a watchdog said, in a plan denounced by the Palestinians as a "war crime".

Settlements watchdog Peace Now tied the move to Israel's March 17 general election in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud is competing with other rightwing parties for the settler vote.

Saudi Arabia's new King Salman has tightened his hold on power, firing two sons of his predecessor and replacing the heads of intelligence and other key agencies in a sweeping shakeup.

The appointments, which analysts said supported signs the kingdom will chart a steady course on foreign and oil policy, came a week after Salman, 79, took the throne following the death of King Abdullah.

At least 25 people were killed, most of them Egyptian soldiers, when militants fired rockets and set off a car bomb Thursday in the Sinai Peninsula, officials said.

The assault targeted a military base, a nearby police headquarters and a residential complex for army and police officers in El-Arish, the provincial capital, as well as a checkpoint in Rafah, on the border with Gaza, the security and health officials said.

Lawyers representing the Comoros on Thursday asked International Criminal Court judges to order its chief prosecutor to reconsider her decision not to probe Israel's deadly 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla.

The Comoros, which has referred the case to the ICC, "asks the Chamber to request the Prosecutor to reconsider her decision not to open an investigation," its lawyers said in papers filed before the Hague-based court.

Syrian representatives of President Bashar Assad's regime and opposition figures ended a two-day round of talks in Moscow Thursday without concrete result, except an agreement to meet again.

Syria's U.N. representative and head of the government delegation in Moscow, Bashar al-Jaafari, told reporters: "We agreed with our Russian friends that discussions will continue in order to hold a (new) consultative meeting in future."