Turkish rescue workers have recovered 10 bodies of miners trapped by a flooding accident last month, with search efforts continuing for eight still missing, reports said Wednesday.

A total of 18 miners were trapped in the disaster in the Ermenek coal mine in the Karaman region of southern Turkey which raised new fears about the country's dire mine safety record.

Indifferent to the sniper fire and shelling around him, the owner of the oldest hotel in Syria's Aleppo sits gloomily in the storied property he has been forced to close.

Just a few metres from the front line separating government and rebel forces in the city, Armen Mazloumian smokes a cigarette on the terrace of the Baron Hotel.

Turkey's top diplomat in Afghanistan has been appointed as NATO's senior representative in the war-torn country, the Turkish foreign ministry and the military alliance said Monday.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has appointed Ambassador Ismail Aramaz as the next senior civilian representative in Afghanistan and he is expected to take up his new post early next year, NATO said in a press release.

A young Turkish man has been arrested on suspicion of burying alive a teenager who had a pre-marital relationship with his sister, reports said Monday.

Akin Tokdenir, 18, was arrested along with his father Ahmet on suspicion of the murder of 16-year-old Onur Sandal, whose body was found in a forest earlier this month. 

The relatives of abducted soldiers and policemen briefly blocked on Monday several roads in the capital Beirut to demand the judiciary to lift sanctions against several Islamist inmates after jihadists threatened to start killing the captives.

The families blocked Beirut's Saifi road and near the port by setting tires on fire.

The captors of the Lebanese troops and policemen threatened Sunday to murder seven of them if Lebanese authorities enforce recent life imprisonment sentences against a number of Islamist inmates at the Roumieh prison.

“The wife of the abductee Khaled Moqbel Hassan received a phone call from the captors, who threatened to kill 7 servicemen if life imprisonment sentences against 5 Roumieh Islamist inmates were not revoked,” LBCI TV reported in the evening.

The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State jihadist group carried out a series of air strikes overnight in the embattled Syrian town of Kobane, a monitor and activists said Sunday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported intensifying clashes between Kurdish fighters defending Kobane and IS jihadists in the south of the town, which lies on the Turkish border.

Turkey and the United States have agreed a plan under which some 2,000 fighters from the moderate Syrian opposition would be trained on Turkish soil, a report said Saturday.

The fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) will be trained at the Kirsehir base some 150 kilometers (90 miles) south of the capital Ankara by both Turkish and U.S. personnel starting from late December, Hurriet Daily News reported, quoting unnamed officials.

Turkey on Thursday freed without questioning or charges 12 radical nationalist protesters who attacked three U.S. sailors in the center of Istanbul in an assault that alarmed the American military.

Several dozen members of Turkiye Genclik Birligi (Turkish Youth Union/TGB) attacked the visiting U.S. sailors on Wednesday afternoon while their vessel the USS Ross was moored in the center of Istanbul on its way back from exercises in the Black Sea.

Turkey is to issue work permits for some of the 1.5 million Syrian war refugees it is hosting, its labor minister said on Thursday, dismissing fears it would harm local workers.

"We will grant a certain number of our Syrian brothers work permits to allow their employment within a legal framework, without hurting the local workforce," Faruk Celik told private NTV television.