Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil lashed out at critics, saying that his meeting with his Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem in New York was held according to norms.

“The meeting was supposed to happen and it did,” Bassil told reporters in France.

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat called on Wednesday for a swift exchange between the Arsal captives and Roumieh prison Islamist inmates, holding former Internal Security Forces personnel responsible for the “self-rule” at the facility.

“The government and crisis cell should follow up any exchange process with the kidnappers,” Jumblat said in an interview with An Nahar newspaper.

The U.S. military cannot bomb the Islamic State group into "obscurity," it cautioned Tuesday, appealing for patience in its escalating attempts to defeat the jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

"No one said this would be easy or quick, and no one should be lulled into a false sense of security by accurate air strikes," Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby told reporters. 

Turkey on Tuesday said Islamic State (IS) militants were advancing on a tiny exclave considered Turkish territory in northern Syria, but insisted it was still in control of the land despite reports its guards there were encircled.

The tomb of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire Osman I, on the Euphrates river, is Turkish territory under a 1920s treaty and still guarded by a few dozen Turkish troops.

The Islamic State jihadist group on Tuesday freed more than 70 Kurdish school children its fighters kidnapped in northern Syria in May, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Britain-based group said parents had reported the release of the children, who are believed to be aged between 13 and 15.

Food aid to millions of Syrians will be cut within the next two months unless fresh funding is received for the humanitarian effort, the top U.N. aid official warned Tuesday.

Last month, the U.N. World Food Program provided food to 4.1 million Syrians but rations have been reduced to reach as many people as possible, U.N. humanitarian aid chef Valerie Amos told the U.N. Security Council.

Extremists cannot be defeated by countries that have "spread terrorism," Syria's President Bashar Assad said Tuesday in an apparent jab at members of the U.S.-led anti-jihadist coalition.

Speaking during a meeting with a senior Iranian official in Damascus, the Syrian leader took aim at countries he said backed "terrorists," a term his regime uses for all those seeking his ouster.

At least eight people were killed on Tuesday, among them four children, when Syrian regime helicopters dropped explosives-packed barrel bombs on a district of northern Aleppo, a monitoring group said.

The attack between the neighborhoods of Sakhur and Sheikh Khodr caused widespread damage, leveling several buildings and shearing the facades off others.

The Islamic State group is holding out in Syria after a week of being pounded by U.S.-led air strikes, benefiting from its tactical flexibility, experts say.

Have the strikes halted IS progress?

One of the leaders of a Turkish pro-Kurdish party on Tuesday crossed the border to visit the Syrian town of Ain al-Arab which has been besieged by IS militants, calling for urgent action by Turkey against the jihadists.

Selahattin Demirtas, a co-leader of the People's Democratic Party (HDP) who came in third against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in August presidential elections, also met a senior Syrian Kurd leader in the town, known as Kobane to the Kurds.