Syrian President Bashar Assad reportedly said that there will be no presidential elections in Lebanon any time soon unless dialogue with Damascus led to a candidate who is an ally.

“This year might witness the election of a new president in Lebanon if certain conditions were implemented,” Assad's visitors quoted him as saying in comments published in the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Seyassah.

The head of Britain's domestic spy agency MI5 warned on Thursday that militant Islamists in Syria were planning "mass casualty attacks" in the West and that intelligence services may be powerless to stop them.

"We know... that a group of core al-Qaida terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West," Andrew Parker told journalists in London a day after an Islamist attack in Paris claimed 12 lives.

The Islamic State (IS) group beheaded Thursday a Syrian imam, or mosque prayer leader, for "insulting God," a monitoring group said.

"The IS executed the imam of a mosque from the village of Abu Khuyut near Hasakeh city (in northeastern Syria) at dawn Thursday," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

No deaths recorded as snowstorm halts Syria fighting

A group monitoring Syria's war said Thursday that it had recorded no deaths in the conflict for the first time in three years as a rare snowstorm forced a halt to fighting.

Turkey is planning to buy four more F-35 Joint Strike Fighters from the US, in addition to the two it had already ordered, the country's defense industry agency said.

"It has been agreed that four more F-35 planes will be procured in addition to the two previously ordered as part of a plan to buy a total of 100 new generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighters," the defense industry executive committee (SSM) said in a statement posted on its website.

The U.N. representative of the opposition Syrian National Coalition demanded Wednesday that the United Nations take down a new photo exhibit sponsored by the Syrian government, saying Syria is using it to "whitewash the regime's war crimes."

The "My Homeland" exhibit opens Thursday with photographs of a ruined Aleppo, including captions that mention defending against "terror groups." Syrian authorities refer to those trying to topple President Bashar Assad as terrorists.

U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos is expected to visit Beirut on Thursday to discuss how world powers can support Lebanon which is overwhelmed by the Syrian refugee crisis.

Discussions between Amos and Lebanese officials are expected to focus on the latest measures taken by the Lebanese authorities to control the flow of refugees to Lebanon.

U.S.-led aircraft have dropped nearly 5,000 bombs in the air war against Islamic State jihadists in Iraq and Syria, damaging or destroying more than 3,000 targets including tanks, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The latest figures released by the U.S. military signal a steady expansion in the scale of the air campaign launched in August and also reveal an adversary with hundreds of armored and other sophisticated vehicles at its disposal.

Gunmen kidnapped several members of the Islamic State group's religious police force in eastern Syria Tuesday, a day after one of the force's leaders was found beheaded, a monitor said.

"Unidentified gunmen ambushed members of the Islamic State's Hesbah force in the town of Mayadeen" in Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. 

An Islamist militant considered one of the main recruiters of foreigners to the jihadist fight against government forces in Syria was convicted in absentia to three years in prison in France on Wednesday.

Algerian Said Arif, who was previously convicted in 2007 in France for terrorist-related activities, was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in central France for crimes stemming from his flight from house arrest in January 2012.