Syria's U.N. envoy will be the regime's chief negotiator in upcoming peace talks, a government source said Thursday, as a dispute over the opposition's representatives threatened to delay the negotiations.

The latest bid to end the Syrian war through indirect talks between the government and opposition was scheduled to begin on January 25 in Geneva.

The Russian military said Wednesday it had bombed the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor after a deadly Islamic State assault saw jihadists tighten their siege in the region.

"The Russian operation conducted military operations only in the provinces of Latakia and Deir Ezzor in light of unfavorable weather conditions and to avoid risks for the civilian population," Russian news agencies quoted military spokesman Igor Konashenkov as saying.

Russian air strikes in Syria have killed more than 1,000 civilians since they were launched nearly four months ago, a monitor said Wednesday.

The raids, which started on September 30, have killed 1,015 civilians, including more than 200 children, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Jordan's Queen Rania has hit back at a cartoon in French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo depicting drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi as a grown-up committing sexual harassment in Germany.

The cartoon shows a pervert chasing a woman, with the caption asking: "What would have become of small Aylan if he grew up?"

Some 600 Britons have been stopped from going to Syria to try to join Islamic State and other jihadist groups, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in comments reported Saturday.

Meanwhile some 800 have made it through since 2012, with half of them still thought to be inside the war-torn country, he said, in comments reported in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph newspapers.

Abdelhadi Zarara, six children in tow, juggles with his emotions as he crosses into Jordan, as thousands of other Syrian refugees wait in no-man's land hoping their turn will come.

Zarara, 39, says "there was nothing left for me in Syria," where his wife was killed a few months ago in a regime bombardment that also destroyed the family home in southern Daraa province.

Russia said Friday it had launched "humanitarian operations" in Syria where it is carrying out a bombing campaign against the Islamic State group, claiming peaceful life was slowly returning to the war-torn country.

"The inhabitants are gradually coming back to Syrian cities and peaceful life is returning," General Sergei Rudskoi, a senior Russian General Staff official, told reporters.

Canada has welcomed its 10,000th Syrian refugee, the government announced Wednesday, although almost two weeks behind schedule and far fewer than it had originally planned to resettle by now.

A planeload landed in Toronto late Tuesday, putting the number of arrivals of asylum seekers at 10,121 since November when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals took office.

Syrian rebels in a former opposition stronghold in Homs will relinquish nearly half their heavy weapons as part of a landmark truce with the government, the provincial governor said Wednesday.

Talal Barazi told AFP that the second phase of the agreement over Waer, which had been the last opposition-held neighborhood in the central city, was under way.

Many Middle Eastern migrants who were granted asylum in Austria last year came from educated backgrounds, a government-funded pilot study revealed Tuesday.

The study by the national employment agency AMS found that of the 898 participants, 61 percent had a high-school diploma, a university degree or professional qualifications.