The Syrian navy opened fire on Wednesday at Lebanese fishing boats off the coast of the northern Lebanese town of al-Arida, detaining three fishermen, the state-run National News Agency reported.

The news agency said that a fishing boat owned by Fadi H., who hails from al-Arida, was damaged but no casualties were reported.

The Islamic State group captured a Jordanian pilot on Wednesday after his warplane from the U.S.-led coalition was reportedly shot down while on a mission against the jihadists over northern Syria.

A senior Jordanian military official confirmed the pilot was seized, saying his plane went down in Syria's Raqa region, a militant stronghold, early on Wednesday.

An Australian man was charged Wednesday with possessing documents connected to a planned terrorist attack on government targets in Sydney as police insisted people should not be afraid.

Sulayman Khalid, 20, was arrested following raids last week which uncovered a large number of documents, a rifle, and two shotguns.

U.S.-led air strikes in Syria have killed more than 1,000 jihadists in the past three months, nearly all of them from the Islamic State group, a monitoring group said Tuesday.

"At least 1,171 have been killed in the Arab and international air strikes (since September 23), including 1,119 jihadists of the Islamic State group and Al-Nusra Front," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of activists and medics across the war-ravaged country for its information.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea considered on Tuesday the flurry of political activity that the Lebanese capital is witnessing to press the election of a new head of state “useless.”

“The election of a new head of state is a mere Lebanese process that relies on the parliamentary blocs,” Geagea said in an interview with the Saudi newspaper al-Jazirah, lashing out at the two blocs that are impeding the process, the Free Patriotic Movement and its ally Hizbullah.

Damascus has agreed to allow deliveries of desperately needed medical supplies to opposition-held parts of Aleppo and two other hard-to-reach areas, the World Health Organization said Monday.

"We have gotten all of the approval letters, we are ready to deliver," the U.N. agency's Syria representative Elizabeth Hoff told Agence France Presse.

The gruesome murders of foreign journalists by the Islamic State group contributed to 2014 being a particularly deadly year for international correspondents, an annual review by the Committee to Protect Journalists reported Tuesday.

The CPJ study found that an "unusually high proportion" of the 60 journalists who died reporting from the world's trouble-spots in 2014 were international journalists.

Since jihadists from the Islamic State group seized control of two northeastern Syrian provinces, Jad has lost all contact with friends there from the country's tight-knit gay community.

The 32-year-old gay man, part of a community that has long suffered from persecution in socially conservative Syria, fears the worst.

Women and girls from Iraq's Yazidi religious minority forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State jihadist group have committed suicide or tried to, Amnesty International said on Tuesday. 

IS militants have overrun swathes of Iraq since June, declared a cross-border caliphate also encompassing parts of neighboring Syria, and carried out a litany of abuses in both countries.

At least four Syrian school children were killed and 10 wounded on Monday when a regime air strike hit their bus in the northwest of the country, a monitor said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said most of those wounded and killed when the Syrian air force hit a school bus near the village of Jubass in Idlib province were under the age of 10.