A double suicide car bombing at the Bab al-Hawa border post between Syria and Turkey on Monday killed at least 16 people, including six rebels, a monitoring group said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, updating an earlier toll, said 20 people were wounded as one car detonated at a checkpoint just outside the crossing and another inside the post.

The United States has received messages from members of the Syrian regime who "want a way out" of the current brutal fighting, a senior US official said Monday. "There are elements inside the regime itself, among its supporters, that are anxious to find a peaceful solution, and we've gotten plenty of messages from people inside, they want a way out," the State Department official told reporters on a conference call.

The United Nations has uninvited the Iranian government from participating in Geneva peace talks aimed at ending the Syrian crisis. Iran had initially been one of ten nations invited to take part in the peace talks, which are scheduled to start on Wednesday, but that invitation was later rescinded after the United States and other Western countries expressed anger at the decision.

The United Nations says Iran has been invited to attend a meeting of foreign ministers In Switzerland on Wednesday ahead of internationally brokered peace talks between Syria's warring factions. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters Sunday afternoon that Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has pledged that his country "would play a positive and constructive role" in the meeting to be held in the Swiss city of Montreux.

The Geneva II Middle East peace conference, to be held on January 22, will take place against a backdrop of singularly appalling numbers: Syria’s brutal civil has left an estimated 130,000 dead, 2.3 million refugees registered in neighboring countries, and some four million more internally displaced.

In its last-ditch attempt to get moderate Syrian opposition groups to the negotiating table, the Obama administration faces the prospect that a no-show wouldn't be such a bad thing. With less than two weeks to go before a long-planned peace conference in Switzerland, the main Western-backed moderate political group seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad has still not decided if it will attend. It's the latest frustration for the U.S. and allies who have spent the last 18 months trying to negotiate a transition of power from Assad to a new, representative government.

Al Qaeda's reign of terror over most of rebel-held Syria may have finally been broken last Friday. On Jan. 3, secular and religious Syrians in various rebel-held towns and cities protested against the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The protests evolved into clashes between ISIS and two rebel groups -- the newly formed Jaish al-Mujahideen and the newly organized Syrian Revolutionaries Front.

Fighters from several Syrian rebel brigades seized the headquarters of the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the main northern city of Aleppo, an NGO said Wednesday. "Fighters from several Islamist rebel brigades took control of the children's hospital in the Qadi Askar district, which is the headquarters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the city," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.