U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to London on Thursday to host with his British counterpart a meeting of members of the coalition against the Islamic State group.

Kerry's spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the one-day talks with foreign ministers from about 20 countries, including Arab states, would focus on "our shared efforts to degrade and defeat ISIL," an acronym by which the group is known.

Syrian forces have evacuated nearly 4,000 people from a rebel bastion close to Damascus that has been under government siege for nearly two years, state media said Sunday.

The mass evacuation from Eastern Ghouta was also reported by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor.

At least 18 people have been killed in unprecedented fighting between Kurdish forces and Syrian government troops in the northeastern city of Hasakeh, a monitoring group said Sunday.

The clashes, which erupted in the early hours of Saturday, were continuing for a second day, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Kuwait will host a third donors conference to raise funds for U.N. humanitarian operations in war-torn Syria, the foreign minister said on Sunday.

Sheikh Sabah Khaled al-Sabah told reporters Kuwait would host the meeting at the request of U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon but that timing was still being worked out.

Several Hizbullah fighters were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike on the Quneitra region in the Syrian sector of the Golan Heights.

“The Israeli enemy's helicopters fired missiles at a group of Hizbullah fighters who were inspecting the town of Mazraat al-Amal in the Syrian Quneitra region,” Hizbullah's media department announced in a statement.

At least 35 Syrian soldiers were killed overnight when an army cargo plane crashed in bad weather in the northwest of the country, a monitor said on Sunday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the plane crashed after hitting electricity lines in heavy fog in Idlib province, a claim echoed by Syrian state media.

Once poised to overrun the Syrian town of Kobane, the Islamic State group has suffered a damaging blow to its ambitions at the hands of Kurdish fighters and U.S.-led warplanes.

The setback in the mainly Kurdish town on the Syria-Turkey border has knocked the momentum out of the jihadists' advance and dashed their hopes of a swift expansion of their territory, analysts say.

Lebanese young man Hussein Haidar, who hails from the northern city of Tripoli, has been killed while fighting alongside extremist Sunni groups in Iraq.

The Tripoli News Network Facebook page announced on Saturday the death of Haidar, who is nicknamed “Abu al-Walid", saying he was killed fighting alongside the Islamic State group.

A South Korean has gone missing in Turkey near the border with Syria, a foreign ministry official said Saturday, following reports that the man had joined the Islamic State militant group.

"The man disappeared on January 10 after he left a hotel" in the southern Turkish town of Kilis near the border with Syria, the official told Agence France Presse.

Around 400 Lebanese youth from the north had joined jihadists in Syria since the beginning of the war in the neighboring country, media reports said on Saturday.

As Safir newspaper reported that in 2014 around 200 Lebanese youth from the north, most of them between 18 – 22, headed to Syria to join rebels.