Taiseer Hamash cradled his two-month old daughter Noor Sham in his arms as he stood by the entrance of the tarpaulin tent his family has called home in war-wracked Syria for over a year.

"She has never seen our old house," said the former factory worker, 29, who fled the fierce fighting in his home region of Aleppo.

The Free Syrian Army claimed on Monday its responsibility for the assassination of prominent Hizbullah member Samir al-Quntar in Syria over the weekend.

It denied in a video Hizbullah's claims that Quntar and his companions were killed in an Israeli jet strike, saying that such allegations are aimed at “making light of the FSA's achievements.”

Prime Minister Tammam Salam received on Friday an official invitation to the upcoming Syria Donors Conference taking place in London on February 4.

A delegation from co-host countries Germany, Kuwait, Norway, the UK, and the United Nations represented by British Ambassador Hugo Shorter, German Ambassador Martin Huth, Norwegian Deputy Ambassador Ane Jorem, Kuwaiti Consul Ahmed El Sabti and U.N. Deputy Special Coordinator for Lebanon Philippe Lazzarini, handed the letter to the Prime Minister.

Suspected Russian air strikes have killed 32 civilians, half of them women and children, in three areas in northern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday. 

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said warplanes bombarded Raqa, the Islamic State group's de facto Syrian capital, as well as the towns of Azaz and Al-Bab in Aleppo province, on Thursday. 

Captain Alexander Shvarts watched on as the iron covers whirred open on the air defense system aboard the Russian navy's Mosvka missile cruiser off the Syrian coast.

"This system can fire up to twelve missiles at any one time," Shvarts said Thursday during a highly choreographed press tour of the ship arranged by the Russian defense ministry. "The range is around 70 kilometers (43 miles)."

Senior international envoys began gathering in New York on Thursday to seek U.N. backing for an ambitious U.S. and Russian plan to seek a negotiated ceasefire in Syria's brutal civil war.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has already traveled to Moscow this week to assure Bashar Assad's key Russian ally that Washington is not seeking "regime change" in Syria.

Mohammed, 22, has lived in Turkey for four years since fleeing Syria, just months after the civil war erupted that has torn his homeland apart.

But unlike hundreds of thousands of others who this year crossed the Aegean Sea in search of better lives in Europe, he has no plans to leave.

After an eight-month investigation, Rio police this week dismantled a network that had provided 72 Syrian immigrants with fake Brazilian identification documents, news reports said Wednesday.

The network had provided the Syrians with birth certificates, identity cards, voters' cards and passports, according to the government news agency Brasil.

Germany's military staged its first aerial refueling mission of allied fighter jets targeting Syria's Islamic State jihadist group, the armed forces said Wednesday.

The A310 MRTT refueled two combat aircraft Tuesday before returning from its five-hour mission shortly after midnight to the southern Turkey military base at Incirlik, said a Bundeswehr spokesman, without identifying the other planes involved.

US Secretary of State John Kerry met Russia's President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on Tuesday to seek agreement on how best to push forward efforts to halt Syria's brutal civil war.

Russia and the United States are sponsors of an international effort to broker a ceasefire and political talks between Bashar Assad's regime and Syria's armed opposition.