The Turkish military has started building a concrete wall along the border with Syria following a series of attacks, state media said Friday.

The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) is building the three meter (10 feet) high wall in the Reyhanli district of Hatay province just across from the Syrian town of Atmeh, the official Anatolia news agency said.

Fleeing war and poverty, record numbers of refugees have made it to Germany, only to face another kind of chaos -- desperately overcrowded shelters struggling under the massive influx.

All over Germany, asylum-seekers from as far as Syria and Afghanistan, and as close as Serbia and Albania, now live in cramped shelters, army barracks and tent cities, often traumatized by the past and fearful about the future.

Russia said Friday that a U.N.-sanctioned Iranian general was not in Moscow "last week" and said it was surprised at U.S. criticism regarding an alleged visit.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Thursday to express concern about the alleged visit of General Qassem Suleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps' foreign operations.

With a ceasefire between Turkey and Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in tatters, the man who could hold the key to restarting the peace process is sidelined and increasingly isolated on a heavily fortified prison island.

Abdullah Ocalan, the iconic leader of the PKK, has only the most limited access to the outside world from his top security jail on the island of Imrali on the Sea of Marmara following his sensational arrest by Turkish agents in Kenya in 1999.

Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State (IS) jihadists in northern Iraq appear to have been attacked with chemical weapons, the German defense ministry said Thursday.

The allegations, deemed "plausible" by a U.S. official, follow claims in March by the autonomous Kurdish government in northern Iraq which said it had evidence that the jihadist group used chlorine in a car bomb attack on January 23.

Once thought dead and buried on the battlefields of Iraq, a muscular and militaristic "neoconservative" approach to U.S. foreign policy is making a comeback.

For most of the last decade, the "neocons" -- personified by former vice president Dick Cheney and ex-Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld -- have been out of office and out of fashion.

It may be paradise for tourists, but Syrian refugees on Kos are desperate to leave the island and start new lives further north after waiting in hellish conditions to get registered.

"The road ahead is still long for me. I leave tomorrow. First I will go to Macedonia, then Serbia. I hope to reach Germany, where I will be treated like a human being," said 16-year-old Ibrahim Najjar, a Syrian Kurd.

Syrian forces have dropped more than 2,000 barrel bombs across the country since July, killing hundreds of people, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Thursday.

U.S. envoy Samantha Power called for action to end the use of a type of improvised explosive that has particularly been targeted at the Damascus suburb of Darayya and the southwest region of Zabadani, near the Lebanon border.

Two Israeli Arabs have been arrested after an unsuccessful bid to join the ranks of the Islamic State jihadist group by passing through Turkey to Syria, security and judicial sources said Thursday.

Adnan Salameh, from Ramleh near Tel Aviv, was arrested at that city's Ben Gurion airport on July 28 after having been expelled from Turkey, the internal security service Shin Bet said.

Syria's main opposition group on Thursday insisted President Bashar Assad must go and rejected calls to join forces against Islamic State jihadists as it met with Russia's foreign minister. 

The head of Syria's National Coalition Khaled Khoja held talks with top diplomat Sergei Lavrov as part of a fresh push by Russia to find a way out of the four-year civil war that has cost some 240,000 lives.