REPORT: Kerry insists no place for Assad in Syria's future

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said on Friday he had handed Russia plans for a ceasefire in Syria's biggest city, Aleppo, and was ready to exchange lists with rebel forces on a possible prisoner swap.

Washington and Moscow have been trying to negotiate some confidence-building measures and allow humanitarian aid to flow in the nearly three-year-old civil war.

"I count on the success of this plan if all sides carry out their obligations," Moualem told a joint news conference in Moscow with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov before a planned peace conference on Syria in Switzerland next week.

"We would like this to serve as an example to other towns," Moualem said of the plan for Aleppo.

Syrian rebels backed by Washington have agreed that if the government commits to such a partial ceasefire, they would abide by it, Washington has said.

It also seems unlikely to be honored by powerful militant Islamist rebel factions, some of whom are at war with both Damascus and other rebel groups backed by the West and Gulf states.

The U.N. refugee agency's chief has renewed a call on all nations to keep their borders open to Syrians fleeing their country, saying Syria's neighbors should not be "left alone" to cope with the influx.             

More than 2 million people have been uprooted from their homes in Syria's civil war, many scattered in refugee camps and informal settlements dotting neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq.               

UNHCR High Commissioner Antonio Guterres said during a meeting with officials from countries neighboring Syria Friday that the international community needed to assume "a true attitude of burden-sharing."

Italian mayors:

Mayors of Italian towns near the port designated as a transit site for Syria's chemical arsenal said on Friday they would protest at the decision unless they were guaranteed maximum security against any environmental or health risk.

The chemicals are being sent to Italy under an accord brokered by Russia and the United States after alleged poison gas attacks in Syria's civil war in August that killed hundreds of people. The nerve gas agents are to be later destroyed at sea.

The Italian government has chosen Gioia Tauro, the country's biggest container port located in the southern region of Calabria, to move 560 tons of Syria's "priority A" chemicals from a Danish ship to an American one.

Ahmet Uzumcu, head of the world's chemical weapons watchdog, said the entire operation would take no more than 48 hours and that the chemicals would not be stored at the port but only transferred from one ship to another.

On the field:

Syrian rebels ousted an al Qaeda-linked faction from one of its northwestern bastions on Friday, activists said, a significant blow to the group after two weeks of infighting that has undercut the insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad.

Rebels from Islamists to relatively secular moderates have been fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) faction in the worst internecine violence to break out since Syria's conflict began in 2011.

The fighting since the start of January has killed over 1,000 people, according to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitors, and helped Assad's forces claw back territory around the northern commercial hub of Aleppo.

On Friday, the Observatory and activists said ISIL had pulled out of the northern town of Saraqeb, strategically important because it straddles highways connecting Aleppo, the capital Damascus and Assad's coastal stronghold of Latakia.

Rival insurgents - including many from the Islamic Front, a large alliance of some of Syria's most powerful rebel groups - had been fighting to take the town for days and moved tanks and machinegun-mounted pickups against ISIL about a week ago.

A Saraqeb-based activist said ISIL's position weakened when an allied brigade pulled out to protect the nearby town of Sarmin, also under siege by the Islamic Front.

A local commander of the Nusra Front - another al Qaeda-linked group which has clashed with ISIL in some areas - said fighters from Nusra and from the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, yet another grouping in the fractured insurgency, would take over military sites and checkpoints while ISIL and the Islamic Front would withdraw.