Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi arrived in Tehran on Monday for talks with key ally Iran, his country's main backer in its civil war.

Halaqi was accompanied by the oil, industry, health and electricity ministers, state news agency IRNA reported, without specifying the duration of the trip.

Senior officials from the United States and Iran resumed talks on Monday over Tehran's disputed nuclear program, a diplomatic source said, three weeks after world powers missed a deadline for reaching a deal.

The two-day discussions in Geneva will be followed by a meeting on Wednesday involving the political directors of the other five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, Germany and the European Union.

Publicly, they are the best of friends working to seal a historic deal to stop Iran's march to a nuclear bomb. But behind closed doors, diplomats from France and the United States barely hide their frustration.

For years, France has been viewed as the toughest member of the group of powers known as the P5+1, after feeling burned in previous pacts under which Tehran covertly continued to advance its atomic ambitions.

The meteoric rise of the Islamic State group and its ability to recruit Western jihadists reflect the extent to which religious radicalism has come to dominate global conflict.

After decades of dictatorship interrupted by three years of revolt, the Middle East saw fresh upheaval in 2014 as IS fighters swept across Syria and Iraq and the Gaza Strip was devastated by its third conflict in six years.

Director of the department of the Middle East and North Africa at the French Foreign Ministry Jean-François Girault is expected to travel to Iran next week as part of his ongoing efforts to resolve the vacuum in the presidency in Lebanon, reported the daily An Nahar on Saturday.

It said that he will then head to the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh.

The European Union confirmed Friday that talks between Iran and world powers on Tehran's nuclear program will resume on December 17 in Geneva.

The talks, first announced in a report from Iran on Thursday, will be at the level of senior officials rather than ministers, the EU's diplomatic service said.

The torture of al-Qaida suspects by the CIA shows that the U.S. government is a "symbol of tyranny against humanity," Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday.

His was the first official reaction in Iran to a U.S. Senate report that torture of suspects in the years following the 9/11 attacks on the United States was far more brutal than acknowledged and failed to produce useful intelligence.

Award-winning Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was briefly detained Wednesday, her husband said, weeks after she was barred from practicing for three years.

The couple's car was surrounded by intelligence agents on a highway in Tehran, Reza Khandan wrote on his Facebook page.

A delegation of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas which controls Gaza arrived Monday for talks with Iranian officials on repairing ties, local media reported.

Tasnim news agency said the team was led by Hamas political bureau member Mohammed Nasr and included Ossama Hamdan, who is in charge of international relations.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani warned Monday that corruption poses a threat to the Islamic republic, pinning the blame in a thinly-veiled attack on powerful monopolies that control the economy.

"The people made the revolution in order to wipe out corruption," Rouhani told delegates at a conference in Tehran.