Saudi-backed Syrian opposition sending delegates to Geneva talks, our newsroom reports:
Syria's largest mainstream opposition group says that it will attend UN-brokered peace talks in Geneva.
However, the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee said it would only send delegates "to participate in discussions" with the United Nations, not for negotiations."
The group has been boycotting the talks until it receives guarantees on aid deliveries to besieged, opposition-held cities in Syria.
It said it would send 30 to 35 representatives to Geneva just hours after a Syrian government delegation started talks there with the UN's Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura.
Representatives of Syria's Kurdish population, which controls much of the territory in northern Syria, also were missing at the opening of the shuttle diplomacy that has been organized by De Mistura.
But reports from Geneva suggested the presence of Kurdish representatives was being discussed, and Russian authorities have said they would not object to the participation of Kurdish delegates.
The meetings began earlier on January 29 with De Mistura meeting with a Damascus delegation led by Syria's ambassador to the UN, Bashar Jaafari. (Reuters, AP, AFP, TASS, and Interfax)
Noah Bonsey of the International Crisis Group offers this commentary on the Syrian opposition's refusal to attend the Syria peace talks until demands to stop bombardments and blockades are met.
Joana Cook from Kings College London's War Studies department says that British mother Tareena Shakil, whom a British court has convicted today of membership in IS, is lucky.
Shakil, who took her toddler son to IS-controlled Raqqa in Syria, managed to escape and return home -- something few women who join IS do, Cook notes.
IS has left Iraq's Ramadi in ruins: Sky News
IS rule and weeks of fighting have left the Iraqi city of Ramadi -- the capital of the western province of Anbar -- in ruins, with no running water or electricity and every bridge destroyed, Sky News reports.
IS militants rigged up dozens of buildings, turning what look like ordinary homes where families lived into houses of horror to kill and terrorize as they please.
In a matter of months, the militants built tunnels, some of them 1km long, to pass through the city undetected by drones surveying the skies above.
British woman who took son to Syria found guilty of joining IS
A British woman who took her toddler son to Syria has been found guilty of membership of the IS group.
Tareena Shakil, 26, is the first woman to return from IS-controlled territory to be convicted of such offenses, the BBC reports.
Shakil admitted traveling to Syria but denied joining IS, saying that she had just wanted to live under Sharia law and had sought to escape an "unhappy family life."
Syrian Turkomans cross to Turkey, fleeing advances of pro-Assad forces: Reuters
Hundreds of mostly Turkoman refugees fearing intensifying clashes between Syrian pro-government forces and the opposition in Latakia province have fled to Turkey, footage from Reuters TV showed and Turkmen officials have said.
According to Reuters, some 400 Turkomans -- ethnic Turks living in Syria -- have left the Syrian village of Yamadi and crossed into Turkey. The flow of refugees has increased since government forces captured the Latakia town of Rabia last week.
The spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against IS in Syria and Iraq, Army Col. Steve Warren, has shared a video showing Iraqi Security Forces being trained using lessons learned from the battle to recapture the town of Ramadi from IS.
The BBC's Lina Sinjab has shared this image from Geneva, showing journalists waiting for the arrival of delegations to the Syria peace talks.