Hundreds of Syrians in the rebel-held north protested Friday against signs of a thaw between Ankara and Damascus after their defence ministers met in Moscow for the first time since 2011.

Several hundred demonstrators gathered in Al-Bab, a town controlled by rebel factions long backed by Ankara, brandishing banners reading: "The revolution is an idea, you can't kill an idea," an AFP photographer reported.

"We will not reconcile, we cannot reconcile, we don't want to reconcile," said Sohbi Khabiyeh, one of the demonstrators who had been displaced from the suburbs of Damascus.

Attacks in eastern Syria killed 12 oil field workers and a Kurdish fighter, a war monitor said Friday, a day after Syrian Kurdish-led forces announced an offensive against jihadists.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which draws on extensive sources inside Syria, gave the toll of a dozen dead in one assault near an oil field west of Deir Ezzor.

In a separate ambush near Al-Shaddadi, south of the northeastern city of Hasakeh, a fighter of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) was killed and five more wounded, the Observatory said.

The true global death toll of Covid-19 remains difficult to nail down three years after the first case was detected, though experts agree there have been far more fatalities than officially reported.

The difference between the official and real figures could diverge even further next year, with modelling predicting more than a million deaths in post-zero-Covid China, which recently narrowed how it counts fatalities.

Married for over a decade, Alia Abdel-Razak is one of a million Iraqis deprived of crucial civil status documents, often caught in legal limbo in a country paralysed by bureaucracy and the ravages of war.

The 37-year-old has to overcome countless hurdles just to get her children into school, and she cannot register her family to obtain the food subsidies she and her husband so desperately need.

Israel's new defence minister Yoav Galant is a former general, a staunch ally of Benjamin Netanyahu and a vocal advocate of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In the military, the 64-year-old oversaw Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and later commanded the "Operation Cast Lead" offensive against its Hamas rulers in 2008-2009.

A Turkish court Thursday refused to release a top doctor who faces years in jail for demanding a probe into the army's alleged use of chemical weapons against Kurdish fighters in Iraq.

Turkish Medical Association head Sebnem Korur Fincanci was detained in October for using a television interview to highlight claims that first surfaced in media close to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The militia said 17 of its fighters had died in Turkish chemical weapons attacks in the mountains and caves of northern Iraq.

Iran's army begins Thursday military exercises in strategic southern regions east of the Strait of Hormuz, state news agency IRNA reported.

Joint drills involving air, land and naval forces -- including both drones and submarines -- will take place around the southeastern port of Jask "east of the Strait of Hormuz", deputy coordinator of the armed forces Admiral Habibollah Sayyari told IRNA.

The Strait of Hormuz is the strategic chokepoint at the head of the Gulf through which a fifth of world oil output passes.

Syrian Kurdish-led forces said Thursday they had launched an offensive against Islamic State group fighters, days after jihadist gunmen launched a deadly prison attack.

Six Kurdish fighters were killed Monday when IS militants attacked a complex in Raqa, the jihadist group's former de facto capital in Syria, in a bid to free fellow militants imprisoned there.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said the offensive, dubbed "Operation al-Jazeera Thunderbolt", aimed to "eliminate" IS gunmen from areas that had been "the source of the recent terrorist attacks".

Nine people have been killed in fighting in Sudan's western Darfur region between groups of Arab Rizeigat and the Fur people, the government said Thursday.

Shooting broke out late Wednesday in Zalingei, state capital of Central Darfur, after a Fur member was killed, sparking wider fighting, witnesses said.

Rizeigat gunmen on motorbikes stormed a camp for displaced people in the city attacking Fur residents, said Adam Regal, spokesman for the General Coordination for Refugees and Displaced in Darfur, a Sudanese independent aid group.

Israel's hawkish veteran Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as prime minister Thursday after a stint in opposition, heading what analysts call the most right-wing government in the country's history.

Netanyahu, 73, who is fighting corruption charges in court, had already served as premier longer than anyone in Israeli history, leading the country from 1996-1999 and 2009-2021.

Parliament voted to approve his government and elected former minister Amir Ohana as the Knesset's first openly gay speaker.