Syrian government forces have launched a counter-offensive under the cover of air strikes in an attempt to regain control of areas they had lost to insurgents the day before in Aleppo, activists and state media said.

The United States, Russia and more than a dozen other countries have declared that Syria's ceasefire is not dead despite increasing violence on the ground.

The little boy who became the face of Syria’s suffering after a video of his bloodied face went viral has been reunited with his parents.

Air strikes by the US-led coalition have killed 28 civilians, including seven children, in a village in northern Syria held by the Islamic State group, according to activists.

A Save the Children-backed maternity hospital in an opposition-held area of northern Syria has been bombed, with casualties reported, the charity has said.

Government had prohibited help for opposition-held Daraya.

World and regional powers have agreed to try and turn a fragile truce in Syria into a comprehensive ceasefire.

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Islamic State (IS) militants have abducted 300 cement workers and contractors in an area north-east of Damascus, Syrian state TV reported as fighting elsewhere in the country also worsened.

Syrian government negotiators at Geneva peace talks are coming under unaccustomed pressure to discuss something far outside their comfort zone: The fate of president Bashar al-Assad. And they are doing their best to avoid it.

US officials said the US and Russia have agreed a plan for a ceasefire in Syria starting on Saturday that would exclude attacks on the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaida’s local affiliate.

Indirect peace talks aimed at resolving Syria’s five-year conflict have begun at the UN headquarters in Geneva, without the participation of the main opposition group.

The Syrian opposition cast doubt on whether it would go to peace talks planned for Friday — throwing UN diplomatic efforts into question as it accused the US of adopting unacceptable Iranian and Russian ideas for solving the conflict.

A UN plan to suspend Syria’s nearly five-year-old civil war calls for listing which militant groups may be fought despite an eventual ceasefire, one of the toughest issues vexing diplomats trying to end the conflict.

Russia continued to bomb Syria for a third day yesterday, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than Islamic State (IS) fighters it said it was targeting.

President Bashar Assad has a “pivotal” role to play in the war on terrorism and in any political settlement to Syria’s devastating civil war, a senior Iranian official said.

Actress Angelina Jolie has pleaded with world powers to help the millions of Syrian refugees, sharply criticising the UN Security Council for being paralysed by its division over Syria’s four-year conflict.

Syrian rebels and government forces have started observing a 10-day truce in the last rebel-held area of the central city of Homs, marking another setback for opposition fighters, activists said.

The Syrian government has agreed “in principle” to a UN envoy’s call for local ceasefires to try to ease the worst fighting in the country’s civil war but needs more details before it can make a final decision, an official said.

Thousands of people "will most likely be massacred" if Kobani falls to Islamic State fighters, a UN envoy said, as militants fought deeper into the besieged Syrian Kurdish town in full view of Turkish tanks that have done nothing to intervene.

Afghans have rioted for a second day over the burning of a Koran in the US, killing nine people in Kandahar and injuring more than 80 in a wave of violence that underscored rising anti-foreign sentiment after nearly a decade of war.

The number of civilians killed or wounded in the Afghan conflict rose 31% in the first six months of the year, and anti-government forces caused about three-quarters of the casualties, the United Nations said in a report today.

Five Afghan police and three Nato service members including one Briton have died in separate roadside bomb blasts, officials said today.

President Hamid Karzai has taken key steps to reform Afghanistan's electoral system, naming a respected former judge to head an organising body and ending his bid to exclude international representatives from a fraud-monitoring group.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today welcomed the reduction in attacks across Iraq and called for similar improvements in the political arena.

Britain today welcomed the appointment of a new top United Nations envoy to Iraq.

ISRAELI warplanes violated Lebanese airspace yesterday, triggering retaliatory anti-aircraft fire that Israeli sources said sent shrapnel over the border into Israel.

ISRAEL threatened Syria yesterday after Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon fired anti-aircraft shells that killed an Israeli teenager on Israel’s northern border, but said it hoped to defuse tension through diplomacy.