BEIRUT (AP) - The Latest on developments in Syria (all times local):
10 p.m.
The U.N. Security Council is calling on Syria’s warring parties to engage with the U.N. on forming a committee to draft a new constitution.
Sweden’s U.N. Ambassador Olof Skoog, the current council president, told reporters Wednesday that September’s meeting of world leaders at U.N. headquarters in New York “would be an extremely useful timeline” for the committee to be formed “to show that there is now a political momentum.”
But Skoog said after a closed briefing by U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura that the ongoing Syrian government military offensive “doesn’t create the best environment for a credible political process.”
He said de Mistura will now take the “strong commitment” from the Security Council for his efforts to facilitate a political solution to the Syrian conflict to a meeting on July 30-31 in Sochi, Russia’s Black Sea resort, of Russia, Iran and Turkey, the guarantor states in the so-called “Astana process” aimed at ending the violence in Syria.
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9:05 p.m.
A local health official says the death toll from an Islamic State ambush on a city and villages in a south Syrian province has climbed to 204.
Hassan Omar tells The Associated Press that hospitals had reported over 180 others wounded.
Omar said among the dead were civilians who picked up weapons to defend their hometowns against the IS assault on Thursday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group put the toll at 183 killed - 89 civilians and 94 local militiamen. It said another 45 IS militants were killed in the clashes.
The Observatory called it the single deadliest day for Sweida province since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011
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5:35 p.m.
Russia says it has sent working groups to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to help coordinate the return of refugees to Syria.
The groups are to conduct “detailed analysis of aspects of the return of refugees to Syria,” Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev of the Defense Ministry said at a briefing Wednesday.
Mizintsev said no refugees should be sent back to Syria unwillingly.
“In taking active steps for concluding agreements with foreign partners about cooperation on refugees’ return to their places of permanent residence, we are continuing to adhere to the principle that the return of refugees to their homeland should be exclusively voluntary and in secure conditions,” he said.
He added that Russia wanted to ensure the return of refugee children by the beginning of the school year on Sept. 1
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4 p.m.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks and suicide blasts in southern Syrian city of Sweida that killed dozens of people.
IS says in a statement posted on the group’s social media channels that its “soldiers” carried out surprise attacks on government and security centers in Sweida on Wednesday.
The bombings - including a suicide attack at a busy vegetable market and a city square - sparked clashes later in the day between Syrian troops and allied militias and IS militants.
IS says more than 100 people were killed.
A Syrian local health official said the bombings and coordinated attacks, and subsequent fighting between local armed groups and militants in Sweida killed over 90 in all.
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3:30 p.m.
A Syrian local health official says a series of suicide bombings and coordinated attacks, and subsequent fighting between local armed groups and militants in southern Syria have killed over 90 people in all.
Hassan Omar told The Associated Press that as many as 80 people were wounded in Wednesday’s attacks and clashes, which the government blamed on Islamic State militants.
State-run news agency SANA earlier reported some of the attacks, including suicide bombings in the city of Sweida, a provincial capital populated by Syria’s minority Druze.
It put the death toll for those attacks and others elsewhere in the surrounding province, also called Sweida, at 38.
The bombings appear to have sparked fighting between local armed groups that killed dozens of others, including IS militants.
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2:15 p.m.
A series of suicide bombings and attacks in southern Syria - including a motorcycle bomber who struck at a busy vegetable market - have killed 38 people.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks but state media, the government mouthpiece, are blaming Islamic State militants for the carnage.
The coordinated attacks in the city of Sweida, a provincial capital populated by Syria’s minority Druze, were the worst in recent months and had all the hallmarks of IS.
The bombings were apparently timed to coincide with attacks by a militant group linked to IS on a number of villages in the province, also called Sweida.
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