Syria's six-year conflict ravages its infrastructure and causes losses to its economy of $226 billion, according to estimates published by the World Bank.

Bomb attacks hit a Damascus suburb which is the site of Syria's holiest Shia shrine, killing at least 12 people, state media reports.

US President Barack Obama rules out US ground troops for Syria and tells the BBC military efforts alone cannot solve the country's problems.

The first major truce in Syria's five-year civil war comes into effect, but Syrian TV says shells hit residential areas of the capital, Damascus.

King Abdullah says people in Jordan are at "boiling point" due to the suffering caused by the influx of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.

Bombings claimed by the Islamic State group kill more than 50 people and wound dozens near a revered Shiite shrine outside the Syrian capital Damascus.

Aid including one month's worth of food and medicine can reach for 40,000 people trapped in Madaya, a besieged Syrian village as early as Sunday morning, the World Food Programme says.

Five Syrians have become the first of 12,000 refugees to arrive in Australia under a one-off plan to resettle people fleeing the country's conflict.

Forget principles and morality. Forget, or try to forget, the quarter-million deaths for which Bashar al-Assad is responsible, directly or indirectly, since choosing to respond with violence to a peaceful uprising of the Syrian people.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will attend multilateral talks on finding a political solution to the conflict in Syria in Vienna this week, a government spokeswoman has said.