Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, one of President Bashar Assad's political adversaries in exile, has appointed a 70-year-old British-educated ophthalmologist as its new leader.

The Brotherhood's council elected Mohammad Hekmat Walid for a four-year term in a vote Thursday in Istanbul, where the Syrian opposition in exile is based, a statement said.

Rescuers found the bodies of two of the 18 miners who were trapped over a week ago inside a Turkish coal mine that suddenly flooded, officials said on Thursday. 

"The intensive efforts that we have undertaken have permitted us to reach the lifeless bodies of two of our worker brothers," Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said in a televised statement. 

A Kurdish female activist was shot dead Thursday on the Syria-Turkey border near the besieged Syrian town of Kobane, allegedly by the Turkish security forces, reports said.

The pro-Kurdish Firat news agency said that Kader Ortakaya, 28, was killed when Turkish security forces opened fire using live ammunition on a protest at the border.

The International Criminal Court will not launch a prosecution over Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla in 2010 in which 10 Turkish activists died, despite a "reasonable basis to believe that war crimes were committed".

Chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said there would be no investigation leading to a potential prosecution because the alleged crimes, including the killing of 10 activists by Israeli commandos, were not of "sufficient gravity".

Turkey is pursuing a delicate but potentially dangerous strategy over the besieged Syrian town of Kobane, working to thwart Kurdish domination of northern Syria but also running the risk of a breakdown of its peace process with the Kurds.

While the United States and the West see the Islamic State jihadists battling Kurds for Kobane as enemy number one, Turkey is equally worried about the risks to its security from separatist Kurdish groups.

Turkey has arrested two suspected people traffickers over the sinking this week of a boat overloaded with migrants off Istanbul that left 24 dead and a dozen still missing, official media said Wednesday.

Two people, whose identities and nationalities were not disclosed, have been arrested on charges of people trafficking and deliberate negligence causing death, the official Anatolia news agency reported.

Prosecutors have demanded life imprisonment for eight executives of a coal mine company in Turkey operating a facility where 301 workers were killed in May in the country's worst mining accident, media reported on Wednesday.

Prosecutors in the western city of Manisa are seeking life terms on a record 301 counts of manslaughter against the suspects, who were arrested and placed in pre-trial detention in May.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's grandiose new presidential palace is costing Turkey more than $600 million, nearly twice previous estimates, the country's finance minister said Tuesday.

The vast new 1,000-room palace -- more than 30 times larger than the White House and bigger even than France's sprawling Palace of Versailles -- has been condemned by the opposition as an absurd extravagance that showed Erdogan was slipping towards authoritarian rule.

Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters who joined the battle for the Syrian border town of Kobane have been heavily shelling Islamic State group jihadists, a commander told AFP.

Speaking to AFP by telephone from inside Kobane, the commander said the peshmerga were manning artillery in support of local Syrian Kurdish militia fighters, who have been battling the jihadists for nearly seven weeks.

Islamic State jihadists subjected a group of teenagers from the Syrian battleground town of Kobane to a string of abuses, including torture, during six months in captivity, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

A group of 153 schoolchildren was taken hostage by IS in May en route to their hometown of Kobane after sitting exams in the Syrian city of Aleppo, according to HRW.