Saudi Arabia's King Salman said his government was striving to maintain Syria as a unified nation inclusive of all sects, according to the Twitter account of the Saudi Shura Council, Reuters reports.
The king blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government for the rise of militant groups in Syria.
A suspected French extremist carrying cans of chemical mace was caught trying to enter Australia two days after the Paris terror attacks, Australian officials have revealed.
Attorney-General George Brandis said the French national was detained at Melbourne airport on November 15 after arriving from the Middle East. The unnamed man, who also possessed "extremist literature," was later deported.
Using extraordinary powers granted to them by France's National Assembly in the wake of the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, French police have conducted over 2,700 raids, arrested hundreds of people and even shut down mosques, the New York Times reports.
But these tactics have alienated the country's Muslim population.
“The Muslim minority in France feels like it’s being treated as the public enemy,” said Yasser Louati, spokesman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. “They are afraid of the government.”
Palestinian-born extremist Islamist preacher Abu Qatada, who was deported from Britain to Jordan in 2013, has told AFP that his 23-year-old son had been released after almost three weeks in detention in Jordan.
Abu Qatada was once described as the right-hand-man in Europe of late Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
American counter-terrorism analyst Daveed Gartenstein-Ross tweets that 70 members of Yemen's IS affiliate have defected. The defectors have not announced which if any group they have joined, but pro-Al Qaeda observers are saying the 70 will join Al-Qaeda.
Analyst Ali Soufan offers this sobering comment on the current state of the Syrian conflict ahead of talks:
France's government is promising a constitutional change to revoke the citizenship of dual-national terrorism convicts as part of measures upholding the state of emergency imposed after the November 13 attacks, AP reports.
Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Russian State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, has said that Turkey has failed to "calculate the consequences of its actions" in Syria, warning that the issue of Kurdish independence will take on greater urgency if the Syrian crisis is not resolved.
The destabilization of Syria will spill over into neighboring states, Pushkov warned.
"Whether this will lead to the creation of an independent [Kurdish] state, it is too early to tell, But if the situation in Syria is not resolved soon, then the Kurdish question will be heard more and more. And take note that Europe is sympathetic to the Kurds," Pushkov said.
Russia's relations with Turkey took a nosedive after a Turkish F-16 downed a Russian Su-24 jet near the Syrian border on November 24.
Sociologist Amy Austin Holmes has undertaken one of the first surveys of the Kurdish Women's Defense Units, the YPJ, who are fighting against the IS group in northern Syria.
The full results have yet to be published, but Holmes found that not all of the Kurdish women are seeking an independent state.
Holmes writes in the Washington Post:
Despite the Western media’s fascination with the Kalashnikov-toting young Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State, there remains a significant lack of basic demographic information about these women. The full results of this research will be released in a forthcoming publication. One of the most surprising findings is that 44 of the 46 respondents did not want to establish an independent state but rather wanted to remain part of Syria.
French authorities say that Yassin Salhi, the man suspected of beheading a businessman at a French gas factory in June has committed suicide in his prison cell, AP reports.
Prosecutors allege that Salhi lured his boss into a van, knocked him unconscious and beheaded him, and that he allegedly carried a long-bladed knife, a gun and two brand-new flags emblazoned with the Muslim declaration of faith.