Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir will visit Moscow on Tuesday to discuss Syria conflict and the Islamic State group with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign ministry said Saturday.

The two ministers last met in Qatar on August 3 when Lavrov, Jubeir and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held a three-way meeting, with the situation in Syria topping the agenda.

While attending the Iraqi army's artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words "God is great."

"It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this," Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani.

The 100 or so refugees set off early evening, hoping that the short walk across Serbia's border into Hungary will be the last leg of their treacherous journey into the EU.

The group are mostly Syrians. Young and old, fathers carrying children on shoulders, mothers with toddlers. One man has a head wound, mugged he says by "Serbian mafia" the previous day.

U.S. President Barack Obama believes Bashar Assad's backers in Moscow and Tehran may see the writing is on the wall for the Syrian regime, offering rare hope for a resolution to a bloody civil war.

Speaking to columnists in the White House on Wednesday to sell his nuclear deal with Iran, Obama also offered a glimmer of optimism about the dire situation in Syria.

A cousin of Syria's President Bashar Assad has shot dead a senior air force officer in a road rage incident in the Latakia coastal heartland of their minority Alawite community, a monitor said Friday.

Suleiman Assad, a first cousin once removed, killed Colonel Hassan al-Sheikh "because he overtook him at a crossroads" Thursday evening, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday to set up a panel to identify who is behind deadly chlorine gas attacks in Syria, which the West blames on the Damascus regime.

Russia, Syria's veto-wielding ally, endorsed the measure as did the rest of the 15-member council -- a rare display of unity over how to address the conflict, which has left more than 240,000 people dead.

The Islamic State group abducted 230 civilians, including at least 60 Christians, in a central Syrian town hours after it captured it, a monitoring group said on Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the civilians were taken on Thursday in the town of Al-Qaryatain, which IS jihadists seized late on Wednesday.

The General Security Department said Friday that its officers have arrested a Lebanese and a Syrian suspected of belonging to terrorist groups.

General Security has apprehended a Lebanese who belongs to the groups of terrorists Osama Mansour and Shadi al-Mawlawi, said a communique.

The United States on Thursday handed over to Iraqi authorities the widow of a senior Islamic State leader who had been detained by US forces since May, the Pentagon announced.

Nasrin As'ad Ibrahim -- also known as Umm Sayyaf or "Mother of Sayyaf" -- was the wife of Abu Sayyaf or "Father of Sayyaf," who was killed in a U.S. special forces raid in Syria in May. 

More than 240,000 people, including 12,000 children, have been killed in Syria's conflict which broke out in March 2011, a monitoring group said Thursday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it has documented the deaths of 240,381 people, up from its tally of 230,618 announced on June 9.