A British mother has been sentenced to five years and four months in prison for trying to take her two children to Syria.
The woman, who cannot be named, left home saying that she was taking her children to a birthday party. She was stopped by authorities in Turkey after her husband alerted the UK police.
Egypt is investigating local media reports that 21 Egyptians have been abducted in Libya, AP reports.
The Al Bawaba online publication said the Egyptians had been staying in the southeastern Kufra region and communications with their families stopped on December 31.
IS militants in Libya beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians in 2015, showing the murders in a graphic video that prompted Egypt to launch air strikes against the group.
AFP has tweeted this graphic showing the location of the three Syrian cities where Damascus has allowed the UN and Red Cross access on humanitarian grounds.
The activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently have posted a picture that they say is of Ali Saker, the IS militant who killed his mother in Raqqa.
The group also say that reports claiming Ali Saker killed his mother because she tried to persuade him to leave IS are not true.
Iraq analyst @Alex_de_M has geolocated the site of yesterday's suicide truck bombing in a police facility in Zlitan, Libya, that killed over 60 people.
New statistics released by the United States Air Force suggest the air war against the IS group is expanding, the Washington Post reports.
For two months in a row -- November and December -- the service dropped over 3,000 munitions. Prior to that the number of munitions dropped has been under 3,000 per month.
Syrian rebel groups including the powerful Islam Army have said that they are facing international pressure to make concessions that would only service to prolong the country's conflict.
The groups said in a statement that an opposition council established to oversee negotiations with the Syrian government was being pushed to "offer concessions that will prolong the suffering of our people and the spilling of their blood."
Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy to Syria, has arrived in Damascus for talks with Syrian officials in preparation for peace negotiations between President Bashar al-Assad's government and its opponents later this month in Geneva.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the recent attack by IS militants on Turkish troops stationed in Iraq's Bashiqa camp justifies Turkey's decision to not withdraw completely from the region, the Anadolu Agency reports.
"I have been told that some 18 Daesh terrorists who tried to sneak into the Bashiqa camp were neutralized," Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul on Friday, confirming that there were no casualties among the Turkish troops.
"Of course this [attack] only proves just how appropriate was the step taken regarding the camp," he said, referring to Turkey's decision to send reinforcement units to the camp in early December.
Suspected U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have killed 11 civilians, mostly children, in a militant-held village in northern Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said.
"Eight children and three women were killed in strikes by the international coalition on Hazima, a village north of Raqqa city" Thursday, said SOHR head Rami Abdel Rahman.