In a dusty, ill-equipped camp in northern Iraq, Yazidis fleeing a jihadist offensive say members of their families -- men, women and even babies -- have been abducted by militants.
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The U.N. Security Council on Friday unanimously adopted a resolution aimed at weakening Islamists in Iraq and Syria by cutting off funding and the flow of foreign fighters.
The measure represents the most wide-ranging response yet by the top United Nations body to the jihadists in Iraq and Syria, who now control large swaths of territory and have been accused of atrocities.
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In a house with a gutted facade, one Syrian soldier strums a guitar, another plays an accordion he found and six comrades join them to belt out a popular song.
They sit around a table sipping bitter "mate" tea popular with soldiers, celebrating their victory over rebels in the town of Mleiha, 10 kilometers (six miles) southeast of Damascus, after months of fighting.
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At least 22 people were killed Friday when a car bomb exploded in front of a mosque in Daraa province of southern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Among the dead in the blast in the rebel-controlled town of Namar were a woman and a child, the Britain-based monitoring group said.
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Turkey's relief agency said Friday it was time for the world to start "sharing the burden" for the 1.2 million Syrian refugees it is hosting, especially those living outside of refugee camps.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have fled the civil war to neighboring Turkey in the last three years after Prime Minister and now president-elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced an open-door policy.
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Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah declared that the “Lebanese support” for gunmen in Syria is still taking place, reiterating that Hizbullah's fighting in the neighboring country's al-Qusayr and al-Qalamunm regions prevented the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant would from reaching Beirut.
"If we hadn't fought in Qusayr and al-Qalamoun, ISIL would have reached Beirut and coastal regions,” Nasrallah said in the second excerpts of an interview in al-Akhbar newspaper to be published on Friday.
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The Turkish authorities were moving hundreds of Syrian refugees Thursday from the southern city of Gaziantep to camps, after three nights of violent protests by locals angered by their presence, reports said.
Tensions between Turkish residents and Syrian refugees in Gaziantep have flared in recent days since the murder of a Turkish landlord allegedly stabbed to death by his Syrian tenant.
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The Moroccan interior ministry said on Thursday it has dismantled a network responsible for recruiting jihadists and sending them to fight in Syria and Iraq for the Islamic State group.
"The operation, based on detailed investigations carried out in close collaboration with Spain, stems from a proactive security approach aimed at battling terrorist threats," a ministry statement said.
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An American assessment team found "far fewer" Yazidis trapped in northern Iraq than expected, making an evacuation mission less likely, as the flight of minority groups from advancing jihadists showed no let-up Thursday.
The U.N. refugee agency had said tens of thousands of civilians, many of them from the Yazidi religious minority, were trapped on Mount Sinjar by jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) militant group, which has overrun swathes of Iraq and Syria.
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Syrian government forces on Thursday retook a key town on the outskirts of the capital Damascus after a months-long battle against rebels, a military source and state television said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group backed up the report.
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