Turkey is celebrating the latest developments in Syria, where the new government has effectively defeated a major Kurdish-led force with an abrupt offensive.

Ankara has long viewed armed groups led by Kurds — an ethnic minority with large populations in eastern Turkey, Iraq and northern Syria — as a threat as Turkey as fought to quell the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, whose decades‑long insurgency claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Europeans were among 150 senior Islamic State group jihadist detainees transferred from Syria to Iraq earlier this week as part of a U.S. operation, two Iraqi security officials told AFP Friday.

The group, which the U.S. military transferred to Iraq on Wednesday, were "all leaders of the Islamic State group, and some of the most notorious criminals," and included "Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Iraqis," one security official said.

European leaders have serious doubts about the scope of President Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" but were ready to work with the United States and the newly founded body in Gaza, EU chief Antonio Costa said Friday.

"We have serious doubts about a number of elements in the charter of the Board of Peace related to its scope, its governance and its compatibility with the U.N. Charter," the European Council president said after an EU leaders' summit in Brussels.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said negotiating teams from Washington, Moscow and Kyiv would discuss territorial control of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region at talks beginning Friday in the United Arab Emirates.

"The Donbas is a key issue. It will be discussed in the modality that the three parties see fit in Abu Dhabi today and tomorrow," Zelensky told journalists, including from AFP, in an online briefing.

More than 134,000 people have been displaced in northeast Syria, the United Nations migration agency said Thursday, after clashes and a fragile ceasefire deal between government and Kurdish-led forces, who have withdrawn from swathes of territory.

In the past three days, the number of internally displaced people in Hasakeh province "has increased to approximately 134,803 individuals" compared to 5,725 recorded on Sunday, the International Organization for Migration said in a statement.

The decision to move prisoners of the Islamic State group from northeast Syria to detention centers in Iraq came after a request by officials in Baghdad that was welcomed by the U.S.-led coalition and the Syrian government, officials said Thursday.

American and Iraqi officials told The Associated Press about the Iraqi request, a day after the U.S. military said that it started transferring some of the 9,000 IS detainees held in more than a dozen detention centers in northeast Syria controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, in northeast Syria.

The U.S. military said Wednesday it has started transferring detainees from the Islamic State group being held in northeastern Syria to secure facilities in Iraq.

The move came after Syrian government forces took control of a sprawling camp, housing thousands of mostly women and children, from the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which withdrew as part of a ceasefire. Troops on Monday seized a prison in the northeastern town of Shaddadeh, where some IS detainees escaped and many were recaptured, state media reported.

Israeli forces on Wednesday killed at least 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including two 13-year-old boys, three journalists and a woman, hospitals said, on one of the war-battered enclave 's deadliest days since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel took effect in October.

The United States is trying to push the deal forward and implement its challenging second phase.

Saudi Arabia and eight Muslim-majority countries including Gaza mediators Qatar and Turkey have agreed to join U.S. President Donald Trump's "Board of Peace", the Saudi foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

In a joint statement, Riyadh announced the "shared decision" of the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates to join the body to be chaired by Trump, saying they supported his "peace efforts" on the Gaza conflict.

Syria's defense ministry said seven soldiers were killed on Wednesday when the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces targeted an arms depot in the country's northeast, despite a fresh ceasefire announced a day earlier.

"Army forces found a factory for producing explosive devices and drone munitions" in Hasakeh province near a border crossing with Iraq, the ministry said, adding that as government forces began securing the site, the SDF "targeted it with a suicide drone, leading to an explosion and the death of seven soldiers", with 20 others wounded.