The Islamic State (IS) militants on Sunday released 19 Christian Assyrians they had kidnapped last month, a monitoring group reported.
The 19 people are the first batch of 29 Assyrians the sharia court of the IS exonerated on Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, Xinhua reported.
On February 23, the IS abducted 220 Christian Assyrians during an assault it had waged on predominantly Assyrian areas, mainly in the area of Tal Tamr and its countryside in Syria's northeastern province of al-Hasakah.
The fate of the other abductees is still unknown amid reports that the rest of the Assyrians are awaiting trials in the IS courts.
There is no clear reason why would the IS even put the Assyrians on trial.
Also on Sunday, the pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV said the Syrian troops captured as many as 33 towns in the eastern countryside of Hasaka after clashes with the IS.
Morocco is winning the fight against terrorism particularly through the promotion and dissemination of moderate Islam as an antidote to religious fundamentalism, according to a leading Italian daily.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 with 239 passengers and crew on board vanished without a trace about an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur early Saturday. The Boeing 777-200ER was presumed to have crashed off the Vietnamese coast in the South China Sea
The multinational search operation to locate the Malaysia Airlines plane that went missing Saturday further expanded Wednesday even as a Malaysian official said that an unidentified object was plotted on military radar that fateful day.
The possibility of a terror link cannot be ruled out yet in the " mystery" of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, John Brennan, director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said Tuesday.
