Russia and Iran are Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's closest allies, and label all opponents of his regime as "terrorists".

Air strikes by Syrian warplanes on a rebel-held region near Damascus killed at least 28 civilians on Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.

The future of Assad has been the key stumbling block in negotiations aimed at ending the six-year war in Syria.

The attack comes just days before a fresh round of UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva aiming at ending Syria's six-year war.

Egyptian authorities on Sunday arrested a senior judge as they press a rare investigation into corruption at a top court, judicial sources said.

After the latest in a string of deadly attacks to hit the country, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the carnage sought to sow chaos, but vowed Turkey would never bow to the threat.

The United States and France voiced outrage at Sunday's attack and said they stood alongside Turkey, their ally in NATO, in its fight against terror.

Four medics were killed and a nurse critically wounded when an air strike hit a clinic in a village near Syria's second city Aleppo, the aid group that supports it said.

Syrian Kurds, who have unilaterally proclaimed a federal region in the country’s northeast, on Monday started carrying out a population census aimed at paving the way for local elections.

Army, tribal forces push towards Sherqat, a town IS fighters took more than 2 years ago.

Turkish court has remanded in custody a man who kicked a young woman in the face because she was wearing shorts, after his initial release sparked a furore among activists, reports said on Tuesday.

A Kuwaiti court sentenced a ruling family member to three years in prison on Tuesday on charges of insulting the Gulf state's ruler and other royals.

Staff at a hospital in eastern Saudi Arabia have gone on strike over unpaid wages, workers said on Monday, in the kingdom’s latest case of corporate financial difficulties.

President Bashar al-Assad on Monday described the deadly US-led coalition raid on his forces in eastern Syria at the weekend as "flagrant American aggression".

Turkish schools reopened Monday for the first time since July's attempted coup, following a summer which saw tens of thousands of teachers sacked or suspended over alleged links to the plotters or to Kurdish rebels.

Air strikes and shelling pounded multiple battlefronts in Syria into the early hours of Tuesday after the army declared a fraught week-long ceasefire over, AFP correspondents and activists reported.

Amnesty International said Monday a US-made bomb was used in an air strike on a hospital in Yemen, urging Washington and London to stop supplying the Saudi-led coalition with weapons.

In a destroyed building in Syria's Aleppo, neighbours Abu Ahmed and Mohammed Ibrahim desperately rummaged through rubble and debris in search of scraps of plastic to turn into fuel.

The Iraqi police and army had decked out the checkpoints with plastic flowers to welcome the first returning Fallujah residents following the city's recapture from jihadists in June.

Syria’s ceasefire was hanging by a thread on Sunday, after tensions escalated between Moscow and Washington over a US-led coalition airstrike that killed dozens of Syrian soldiers battling militants.