Syria

A monitoring group said the Syrian army lost control of a second strategic base in the northwestern province of Idlib to coordinated assaults by Islamist groups on Dec. 15.
      

French police launched raids across the country early on Dec. 15, dismantling a network sending jihadist fighters to Syria, a police source told AFP.
      
Elite and anti-terror police units descended on around a dozen targets, mostly in the southern region of Toulouse, but also around Paris and in the northern region of Normandy, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Five people fled a central Sydney cafe Dec. 15 where a gunman is holding terrified hostages after displaying an Islamic flag at the window, triggering a lockdown in an area home to government and corporate headquarters       

Syria's army seized an area north of Aleppo on Dec. 14 and killed insurgents in battles for the strategic territory, a group monitoring the war and state media reported.
  
Syria's second city is at the heart of a fierce battle between pro-government forces and a range of insurgents, including al Qaeda's Syria wing, Islamist brigades and Western-backed rebels.
   

State Secretary for European Affairs with the Romanian Foreign Ministry (MAE) George Ciamba will be attending a meeting of the European Union's Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels over Dec. 14-15, MAE informs in a release on Sunday.

A Syrian from war-torn Aleppo was declared the winner of this year's "Arab Idol" singing contest at the grand finale of the gruelling four-month television competition in Beirut this weekend.
      

Turkey has moved to revive broken ties with Middle Eastern countries, including Syria, Egypt and the Gulf states, according to Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, who stressed the "friendship and brotherhood" amid the ongoing crises in bilateral relations.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group's self-declared police force in western Syria decapitated four men after accusing them of blasphemy, a rights group monitoring the Syrian conflict said on Dec. 13. 

The men were beheaded in the countryside east of the city of Homs by the militant group's "Islamic Police", the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. 

The fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is unifying not only Baghdad and Arbil, but also the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, thereby creating a completely new Kurdish reality in the region.

BELGRADE - State Secretary with the Interior Ministry of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) Bakir Dautbasic said Friday that the departures of citizens of Western Balkan countries to join wars in foreign countries, notably Syria and Iraq can be prevented by regional cooperation.