Syria's Supreme Constitutional Court has accepted three applications out of 51 for candidacy for this month's presidential elections in the war-torn country, state media reported Monday.

The largely symbolic election is certain to be won by President Bashar Assad, who was chosen along with two other men, Abdullah Salloum Abdullah and Mahmoud Ahmad Marie, to run. Some 51 candidates, including seven women, had applied to be candidates. The Parliament later referred the names to the constitutional court.

Member states of the global chemical weapons watchdog voted Wednesday to strip Syria of its rights at the organisation in an unprecedented step after a probe blamed Damascus for poison gas attacks.

A first batch of Covid-19 vaccine doses was expected to arrive Wednesday in war-torn northwestern Syria, where millions of people live in dire humanitarian conditions, a UN official said.

Syria's central bank devalued the pound on Thursday, bringing the currency's official exchange rate closer to the black market rate, two days after the government sacked its governor.

Rights groups in Moscow urged Russians to take responsibility for abuses in Syria as they released a damning report Friday on the country's role in the decade-old conflict.

At age 19, Fatima al-Omar is at her wits' end. In the last year alone, she lost her home to fighting in Syria's last rebel-held enclave and her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She became the sole breadwinner for her mother, three siblings and grandmother as they moved around between shelters.

Then the coronavirus struck, aggravating conditions in northwest Syria just as new fighting had uprooted 1 million people — the biggest wave of displacement in the country's 10-year war. By late 2020, al-Omar contracted COVID-19, costing her the last job she had picking olives. She hasn't been able to find work since and is now at risk of another eviction.

Pro-Ankara Syrian militia deployed in Libya have started to withdraw, a French diplomatic source said on Thursday, describing the move as "encouraging".

Mohammed Zakaria has lived in a plastic tent in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley for almost as long as war has raged in his native Syria.

He and his family fled bombings in 2012, thinking it would be a short, temporary stay. His hometown of Homs was under siege, and subject to a ferocious Syrian military campaign. He didn't even bring his ID with him.

At least 31 killings have rocked a camp holding Islamic State group relatives in Syria since early January, a Kurdish official said Wednesday, with aid groups warning of a "nightmare". 

Syrian air defences intercepted Israeli missiles over Damascus on Sunday, Syrian state news agency SANA said.