Efforts to free a captive journalist from the militant Islamic State group have reached a "state of deadlock", a top Japanese diplomat says.

Islamic State fighters backed by tanks and artillery have pushed into an embattled Syrian town on the border with Turkey, sparking heavy street battles with the town’s Kurdish defenders.

Islamic State fighters have broken through the defences of a major military air base in north-eastern Syria, activists said.

More than €200,000 in Irish aid is to be sent to Iraq today.

The al-Qaida breakaway group that has seized much of north-eastern Syria and huge tracts of Iraq formally declared the establishment of a new Islamic state.

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Security forces opened fire at tens of thousands of mourners who turned out for the funeral of a slain Kurdish opposition leader in north-eastern Syria today, killing at least two people, activists said.

At least 106 people were killed today when a suicide car bomber drove into a crowd applying for work at a government office south of Baghdad, then blew himself up.

IRAQI officials said yesterday Syrian authorities had captured Saddam Hussein’s half-brother and 29 other officials of the deposed dictator’s Ba’ath Party in Syria and handed them over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture.