The United Nations on Monday said it was waiting for regional powers spearheading the Syria peace process to agree on who will take part in talks starting in just one week's time and raised the possibility of a delay.

The peace talks, the first between the Syrian government and the opposition since 2012, are scheduled to open in Geneva on January 25, but invitations have yet to be sent to the delegations.

The General Security announced on Saturday the arrest of a Lebanese national on terrorism charges.

It said that M.M. was arrested for belonging to the Islamic State extremist group.

Syria's al-Qaida affiliate briefly detained two of the country's most prominent media activists who worked at a radio station in the northwestern Idlib province on Sunday, their employer said.

Raed Fares and Hadi al-Abdallah were released about 12 hours after their abduction, Fresh FM said in a statement posted on Facebook.

Turkish authorities arrested three people over the death of a Syrian filmmaker who was assassinated in southern Turkey after producing anti-Islamic State documentaries, the state media said Sunday.

Naji Jerf, 37, was shot dead in broad daylight in Gaziantep province late December by assailants using a silencer outside a building that houses Syrian opposition news outlets.

Suspected U.S.-led coalition air strikes have killed 11 civilians, mostly children, in a jihadist-held village in northern Syria, a monitor said Friday.

"Eight children and three women were killed in strikes by the international coalition on Hazima, a village north of Raqa city" on Thursday, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Head of the Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc MP Fouad Saniora slammed on Thursday the silence over the “crime against humanity” that is taking place in Syria's Madaya.

He said: “The crime in Madaya is a black mark against all those who are witnessing it and have failed to do anything about it. Why is no one talking about this crime?”

The U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, was in Riyadh Tuesday for talks with diplomats and Syrian opposition representatives on efforts to end the nearly five-year war, an Arab source said.

His visit comes amid heightened tensions between Saudi Arabia, the main Sunni power in the region, and Shiite-dominated Iran over Riyadh's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric and dissident.

Germany will reinstate individual interviews for Syrian asylum seekers from Friday, the interior ministry said, essentially tightening an official procedure that had been relaxed for citizens of the war-torn country.

In a bid to swiftly process a million migrants who have arrived in Germany this year alone, Berlin had earlier simplified the asylum seeking procedure for those from war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq.

More than 55,000 people were killed in Syria in 2015, the country's fifth year of war, including over 2,500 children, a monitor said Thursday.

The total number of dead since the beginning of the conflict had reached more than 260,000, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, though the number of those killed in 2015 was lower than the 76,021 people who died in 2014.

World Cup-winning All Black Sonny Bill Williams drew criticism from UNICEF Wednesday for tweeting graphic photos of dead children after visiting a Syrian refugee camp.

The images were posted less than a month after Williams went to camps in Lebanon with the United Nations' Children Fund, as part of a UNICEF campaign to raise awareness of the plight of Syrians living there.