The emir of Qatar on Thursday met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for surprise talks in the capital Ankara, a Turkish presidential official said. 

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani was holding closed-door talks at Erdogan's newly built presidential palace in Ankara, the official told Agence France Presse, without elaborating further.

More than 50 regime soldiers and Islamist fighters were killed as they battled over a strategic hilltop in Syrian President Bashar Assad's home province, a monitoring group said on Thursday.

Government forces clashed with al-Qaida-affiliated militants backed by other armed Islamist groups in a village in Latakia province in the northwest.

Mohammed Bakkar spends his days with his father and son in a small classroom in Lebanon near the Syrian border, where they cook, eat, wash and sleep, waiting for the day they can reunite with the rest of their family.

Bakkar's mother, wife and four other children are hundreds of miles away in Jordan's Azraq refugee camp, squeezed into a white prefab trailer of corrugated metal. When they fled to Jordan after government attacks in their village in Syria in 2013, they thought it would be just a few weeks until they were reunited. It has been more than two years.

More than 20 human rights groups issued a joint plea Thursday for the international community to take responsibility for suffering civilians as Syria's civil war approaches its fifth year.

In a report entitled "Failing Syria", they criticized world powers for not implementing a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions on the conflict.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has said he would visit Beirut mid-April to attend a ceremony on the first shipment of $3 billion worth of weapons paid for by Saudi Arabia.

However, Le Drian told pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat in remarks published on Thursday that the delivery of helicopters, missiles, warships, telecommunications equipment and other defense material will take three years to complete.

Despite Western and Arab hopes he would be consigned to the dustbin of history, Syrian President Bashar Assad enters his fifth year of war with an increasingly tight hold on power.

Alarm over the sweeping expansion of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group in Syria and Iraq means that international priorities have shifted away from Assad's removal.

Much of Syria is regularly plunged into debilitating darkness, experts said Wednesday, highlighting the scale of the war's devastation as the conflict enters its fifth year.

Analyzing satellite images, scientists from Wuhan University in China found that since March 2011, when the war broke out, "the number of lights visible over Syria at night has fallen by 83 percent," a coalition of 130 non-governmental organizations said in a statement.

The presence of Iranian advisers in the Iraq battle for Tikrit is "concerning" to the United States, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday.

A mostly Shiite Iraqi force, including Iranian-backed militias, entered Tikrit Wednesday from the Islamic State group after a 10-day push to enter the city.

Iran's top general said Wednesday his country has reached "a new chapter" towards its declared aim of exporting revolution, in reference to Tehran's growing regional influence, while hailing the role of Hizbullah in resisting Israel.

Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the nation's powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, said: “Hizbullah and its resistance against one of the armies in the world -- that is to say the army of the Zionist regime.. is one of the Islamic revolution's miracles," he said.

A Swiss man of Syrian Christian origin who battled the Islamic State group faces charges after returning home, raising the issue of how Europe handles citizens fighting IS.

European governments already face the headache of dealing with citizens who have gone to Syria to join the ultra-violent Islamist IS group. But volunteers in units fighting against IS pose a new problem.