Fifteen members of Hizbullah were killed in fierce battles with rebels on the outskirts of the town of Fleita in the Syrian al-Qalamoun region, the Syrian National Coalition said.

The coalition said that the rebels controlled the Syrian town of Fleita after the intensified battles with the Syrian regime troops and Hizbullah.

Journalist James Foley's jihadist captors sent his family a taunting and rambling email threatening to kill him, just a week before making public a video of his execution, the American reporter's employer said Thursday.

GlobalPost said it released the full text of the email from Islamic State (IS) militants "in the interest of transparency and to fully tell Jim's story." 

Iraq's Mahdi Army fought U.S. troops to the death in past years, but now some members of the rebranded Shiite militia say they could do with a little help from their old foe.

Some 12,000 foreign jihadists from 50 countries, including Americans, have gone to fight in Syria since the conflict began, the U.S. State Department said Thursday.

A U.S. official estimated that more than 100 U.S. citizens have traveled or tried to travel to Syria to join the conflict.

The United States admitted Thursday that the Islamic State is the most dangerous group it has faced in recent years, and warned that the Middle East faces a long-term battle to defeat it.

Pentagon chiefs said the jihadist group could be eradicated if local Sunni communities reject it and regional powers unite to fight it, but only if the battle is taken into Syria and not just Iraq.

The U.S. military must take decisive action to "destroy" Islamic extremists in both Iraq and Syria before the threat from the jihadists expands, a former American general said on Thursday.

Tunisia Thursday condemned the "savage crimes" of the Islamic State (IS) after it beheaded American journalist James Foley, calling the jihadist group a threat to all states in the region.

Human Rights Watch Thursday said that hundreds of victims of a chemical weapons attack in Syria remained without justice one year on, days after Damascus's stockpile was completely destroyed.

More than 180,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict broke out in March 2011, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a new toll published Thursday.

The Britain-based monitoring group, which relies on a network of sources on the ground, said it had documented the deaths of 180,215 people.

President Francois Hollande said on Thursday that France had delivered weapons to rebels battling the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad "a few months ago."

The deliveries took place "a few months ago, when the Syrian rebels had to face both the armies of the dictator Bashar Assad and this terrorist group Islamic State," Hollande told reporters on a tour of the French island of La Reunion.