REPORT: Syria ships out first batch of chemical weapon materials ...

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Syria has moved the first batch of chemical weapon materials out of the country after transporting it from two sites to the port city of Latakia and onto a Danish vessel, the international chemical weapons watchdog said on Tuesday.

"The vessel has been accompanied by naval escorts provided by Denmark and Norway, as well as the Syrian Arab Republic," the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said in a statement. "It will remain at sea awaiting the arrival of additional priority chemical materials at the port."

On another note, the Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi said that the so-called “ISIL, Free Syrian Army” and other armed groups are considered terrorist organizations, stressing that Syria is keen on ensuring the success of Geneva 2 conference in order to meet the aspirations of the Syrian people.

In a press conference, al-Zoubi said that those who implemented attacks in Russia are the same ones who are attacking Damascus and Baghdad, stressing the need to hold the country behind all these acts accountable.

On the field:

Syrian rebels have killed 34 foreign fighters from al Qaeda-linked groups in the northwest of the country over the last three days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday.

The killings in the Jabal al-Zawiya region appeared to be part of the wider confrontation by an alliance of rebels against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), across rebel-held territories of northern and eastern Syria.

Observatory director Rami Abdulrahman said most of the 34 dead were ISIL fighters, along with some others from an allied group called Jund al-Aqsa. They were captured, separated from Syrian fighters, and killed, he said.

It was not possible to verify the report independently due to reporting restrictions in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's forces have been battling rebels in a nearly three-year conflict which has killed more than 100,000 people.

The latest infighting between Assad's foes erupted four days ago in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Idlib, fuelled by resentment against ISIL's radical Islamist agenda and a turf war near the Turkish border for strongholds which control supply routes into northern Syria.

The fighting has also spread to the eastern city of Raqqa, the only Syrian city under full rebel control.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, another opposition monitoring group, said on Monday 71 ISIL fighters, 20 rival rebels and 26 civilians had been killed in the fighting to oust ISIL in Raqqa and other parts of Syria since Friday.

The fighting took place as ISIL fighters seized Sunni Muslim towns hundreds of miles away on the Euphrates in neighboring Iraq, challenging a Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad which they see as allied, like Assad, to Shi'ite Iran.

UN stopped updating Syria's death toll

The UN's human rights office says it has stopped updating the death toll from Syria's civil war since its last count of at least 100,000 in late July.

Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, blamed the failure to provide new figures on the organization's own lack of access on the ground in Syria and its inability to verify "source material" from others.

Colville told reporters Tuesday in Geneva that the total number of dead the UN had estimated was based on an exhaustive effort to verify a combination of six different figures supplied by a variety of sources and "for the time being we're not updating those figures."

AP/REUTERS

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