The IS group has murdered at least 25 people in Syria for being gay, including two under 18, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has told The Independent.
Six people have been stoned to death, three killed by being shot in the head and 16 killed by being thrown from high buildings, SOHR said, adding that those who survived the fall were then stoned to death on the streets by bystanders.
A 15-year-old boy was reportedly thrown from a rooftop in Syria's Deir al-Zor city after being raped by a senior IS militant named Abu Zaid al-Jazrawi, who was spared killing but forced to leave Syria.
That concludes our live-blogging of the crisis surrounding Islamic State for Tuesday, January 5. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage.
The IS group has threatened to destroy Saudi Arabian prisons holding militants after Riyadh's execution of 47 people including 43 convicted al Qaeda militants, Reuters reports.
IS singled out the al-Ha'ir and Tarfiya prisons where many Al-Qaeda and IS supporters have been detained.
"The Islamic State always seeks to free prisoners, but we calculate that the ending of the issues of prisoners will not happen except with the eradication of the rule of tyrants, and then destroying their prisons and razing them to the ground," it said in an article posted online on January 5, according to Reuters.
AP has obtained a document suggesting that the Obama administration's best-case scenario for political change in Syria does not see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stepping down before March 2017.
The document contains an internal timeline prepared for U.S. officials, based on a plan endorsed by the United Nations and laid out at an international conference in Vienna in November. According to the plan, Syria would hold presidential and parliamentary elections in August 2017.
A documentary about American freelance journalist James Foley, who was beheaded by the IS group in 2014 after being held hostage since 2012, will make its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on February 6, the cable network HBO has said.
Sources in Libya's oil terminal Sidra are reportedly saying that the IS group is planning another attack in the oil crescent and that reinforcements are arriving in the town of Bin Jawad to the west of Sidra.
The reports have not been confirmed.
IS attacked Sidra and the nearby Ras Lanuf for two days in a row.
There are also unconfirmed reports, citing oil terminal sources in Sidra, that the fighting in Sidra has damaged three crude storage tanks belonging to a subsidiary of the Waha Oil Company of total capacity 1.5M barrels.
The UK government is facing accusations of a major security lapse after it emerged that a British man suspected of appearing in the IS group's latest propaganda video managed to slip out of the country despite being on police bail.
The Independent reports that police had sent Siddhartha Dhar a letter to his home address six weeks after he had already left for Syria, asking him to "surrender all travel documents" to a London police station.
The IS group in Raqqa hijacked the Facebook account of a female activist it murdered in order to trap other anti-IS activists, The Independent writes.
IS is thought to have killed Ruqia Hassan Mohammed in September after abducting her in Raqqa in July.
But a citizen journalist from the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently group claims IS kept her Facebook account open "in order to entrap friends who communicated with her."
Libyan journalist Ali Al-Rahqan has posted on Facebook what he says are details of one of the car suicide bombers used by the IS group on January 4 in an attack on the oil terminal of Sidra.
Al-Rahqan claims the suicide bomber was a 15-year-old boy named Abdel Moneim Dwilla, originally from Tripoli.
According to Al-Rahqan, Abdel Moneim's family said the boy had become more religious, telling his mother that he was going to pray at a different mosque because his usual mosque belonged to a Sufi and was therefore "haram" or forbidden for him.
After some time, Abdel Moneim disappeared and his family thought that he had been abducted. But a day or so later, his father was contacted from a strange number and informed that his son was "in the land of the Caliphate," in other words in IS-controlled Sirte.