Australia will reserve more than 2,000 places in its refugee program for Syrians, at the same time as it tries to return Syrians held in offshore detention to the country the immigration minister describes as “in the midst of a terrible conflict”. Syrian refugees will have 2,200 places set aside within the Special Humanitarian Program (SHP), which takes in refugees who can prove they already have a connection to Australia.

The Middle East is in turmoil and increasingly there is a need for the two regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to mend their differences in an effort to address urgent regional security matters. There is no denying that the Arab-Persian rivalry and sectarian divide is deep-rooted and will require serious dialogue and engagement to be rectified. 

European Union foreign ministers met in a emergency meeting on Friday to discuss the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Iraq. EU leaders welcomed the resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, saying it paved the way for a potential political solution in that country. The Czech Republic and the Netherlands joined France in agreeing to send military equipment to aid Kurdish forces.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State, formerly known by the acronym ISIS, is actively recruiting Western women and girls. And in the process this “caliphate” that now occupies large swathes of Syria and Iraq is showing, once again, that it’s almost as shrewd with social media as it is ruthless on the battlefield. The tweets and blogs apparently are written by Western women married to jihadi warriors.

Finding any encouraging news coming out of Syria is difficult. The Bashar Assad regime clearly will pay any price to retain power, inflicting misery upon those parts of the population it can reach. Parts of Syria, however, remain outside the control of the government and the similarly vile extremist groups that defile their religion through their bloody tactics.

Last year, the Syrian military-police photographer defected to the West. Investigators later gave him the code name Caesar to disguise his identity.  All told, Caesar helped smuggle more than 50,000 pictures out of Syria—his own and many others he downloaded that were taken by other photographers, according to activists working with him.

A man claiming to be the self-appointed caliph of the Islamic State jihadist group made what is thought to be his first taped appearance in a video that circulated on social media Saturday.  Previously there were only two known images of the notoriously elusive Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.