Syrian troops battled rebels around a military intelligence base in Aleppo in what a monitoring group said Saturday was the fiercest fighting in the northern metropolis since mid-2012.

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman said the overnight clashes were "the fiercest since the fighting began in Aleppo and the closest yet to the intelligence base in the Zahra neighborhood."

For 22 years, Mary Mansourati has been waiting for her son, Dani, to come home. His shirts are ironed and hanging in his closet. His trousers, neatly folded, are stacked on the shelves next to his bed in the family's Beirut apartment.

Dani was 30 when he was detained by Syrian intelligence and has not been heard from since. He is among an estimated 17,000 Lebanese still missing from Lebanon's civil war or the years of Syrian domination that followed.

As he pushes a cart full of tomatoes and cucumbers in the market at Bint Jbeil in southern Lebanon, nothing marks out Mahmoud as an experienced Hizbullah fighter.

The stocky vegetable vendor in his fifties, who sports a red beard, fought Israel in 2006, but that battle is now old news.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea revealed on Friday that he will propose to Hizbullah if he was elected as president “real partnership,” considering that the theory of “vacuum at the presidential post is better than choosing a weak head of state” has crumbled after he ran for the presidency.

“I will suggest real partnership with Hizbullah to build a state that is capable with the army's weapons as the only means to protect all the citizens,” Geagea said in an interview with As Safir newspaper.

Syria's al-Qaida affiliate lost ground to its jihadist rivals around a town on the Iraqi border on Thursday in heavy fighting that left 51 combatants dead, a monitoring group said.

The fighting erupted at dawn after an assault by the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on posts held by al-Qaida affiliate al-Nusra Front and its allies.

The Lebanese army enforced strict measures in the northern city of Tripoli on Thursday to restore calm following overnight gunbattles with gunmen in the neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh.

According to a communique issued by the army command on Thursday, the military is carrying out raids in pursuit of offenders who opened fire at the army and arrest them.

Two car bombs killed at least 25 people, including women and children, in a government-held neighborhood of Syria's central city of Homs Wednesday, state news agency SANA reported.

Another 100 people were wounded in Karam al-Luz, in attacks SANA blamed on "terrorists," the government's term for people fighting to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned the "destruction" of Syria at a general audience in St Peter's Square following the murder of a Catholic priest in Homs.

"May the weapons fall silent! No more war, no more destruction," Francis said, expressing his "profound pain" after the killing of Father Franz van der Lugt.

Syria's Red Crescent and the U.N. refugee agency have delivered aid to rebel-held areas of Aleppo city for the first time in 10 months, the Red Crescent said Wednesday.

"Yesterday at noon we and a UNHCR team were able to bring in aid from the Jisr al-Haj crossing," Red Crescent operations chief Khaled Erksoussi told Agence France Presse.

Syria's army seized the rebel-held town of Rankus on Wednesday, state media reported citing a military source, as the regime extends its control over the strategic Qalamun region.

"Units of the Syrian army have now accomplished their operation in the Rankus area and restored security and stability after eliminating a large number of terrorists," state media said.