The Syrian regime's air force used the chemical weapon chlorine in an attack on the town of Saraqib in 2018, the global toxic arms watchdog said on Monday after an investigation.

Syrian President Bashar Assad and his wife have recovered from COVID-19 and returned to their regular duties on Tuesday, three weeks after they had tested positive for the coronavirus, the president's office said.

According to the statement, Syria's first couple had their PCR tests and the results were negative, and the mild symptoms of the virus that they had experienced before were now gone.

After ten years of war in Syria, the international community will be asked to step up with billions of dollars in new aid pledges on Monday to fund humanitarian causes.

The Philippine immigration bureau said Wednesday it has launched an investigation into allegations that some of its officers were involved in the trafficking of 44 women to work in Syria.

Airstrikes on several locations in northwest Syria near the border with Turkey have killed at least one person and set afire several trucks used to distribute aid, opposition activists and a paramedic group said Monday.

The late Sunday attacks angered Turkey, which had asked Russia to secure an immediate end to the strikes, Turkey's Defense Ministry said, adding that Turkish troops had been placed on alert.

Daraa was an impoverished, neglected provincial city in the farmlands of Syria's south, an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim backwater far from the more cosmopolitan cities of the country's heartland.

But in March 2011 it became the first to explode against the rule of President Bashar Assad. Assad's decision to crush the initially peaceful protests propelled Syria into a civil war that has killed more than a half million people, driven half the population from their homes and sucked in foreign military interventions that have carved up the country.

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.

From videos of deadly air strikes to jihadist takeovers, Al-Mutez Billah's YouTube page served as a digital archive of the Syrian war until automated takedown software in 2017 erased it permanently.

President Joe Biden said Friday that a US air strike against an Iranian-backed militia in eastern Syria, the first since he took office, should be seen by Iran as a warning.

A German court on Wednesday jailed a former Syrian intelligence agent for complicity in crimes against humanity in the world's first prosecution over state-sponsored torture by the Syrian government.