A wave of Russian air strikes killed at least 21 Islamic State group jihadists in the Syrian desert over the past 24 hours, a war monitor said on Saturday.

Israel fired several missiles early on Monday targeting areas near the Syrian capital, Damascus, Syria's state news agency reported. An opposition war-monitoring group said the strikes killed nine Iran-backed fighters.

The SANA news agency claimed that Syrian air defenses shot down most of the missiles, which it said were fired from Syria's Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Four civilians, including two children, were killed by Israeli strikes on the Syrian province of Hama at dawn on Friday, the Syrian state news agency SANA reported.

The Syrian conflict claimed at least 6,800 people in 2020, the lowest annual death toll since it began nearly a decade ago, a war monitor said Thursday.

Israeli air strikes in Syria targeting the pro-Damascus Lebanese Hizbullah group and Syrian air defence forces killed one Syrian soldier and wounded five others, a war monitor said Wednesday.

Germany said Friday it would allow deportation of Syrians to their war-ravaged homeland from 2021 if they are deemed a security risk, five years after a massive refugee influx.

The EU's biggest economic power and most populous member allowed in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Syria's devastating civil war in 2015-16 but security officials said it was time to lift blanket protections against expulsion.

The overall death toll for Syria's civil war has crept up to 387,000 following the least deadly of 10 years of conflict, a monitor said Wednesday.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday his country will continue to support Syria, urging Damascus to confront Israel in the occupied Golan Heights.

Rouhani's website said the remarks came during a meeting with visiting Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad.

Strolling through the alleyways of war-torn Syria's capital, Rania Kataf snaps photos of the city's famed houses, capturing their nooks and crannies for posterity.

More than 900 pro-Turkish Syrian fighters have returned to Syria after the end of fighting in the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh, a Britain-based Syrian war monitor said Wednesday.

A November 9 truce ended more than a month of fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the ethnic Armenian enclave that broke away from Baku's control in a war in the 1990s.