Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu took a swipe at the United Nations and world powers on Thursday over their failed efforts to end the war in Syria, saying they lacked a clear strategy.

Davutoglu told reporters after meeting Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that the U.N. plan to freeze fighting in Aleppo, which has failed to make headway, fell short of a comprehensive approach.

The military commander of al-Nusra Front in the Syrian province of Idlib was killed Thursday in an operation by the Syrian army, state-run news agency SANA said.

The agency said Abu Hammam al-Shami was slain during a military operation that targeted a Nusra meeting in the village of Habeet, in the northern Idlib province.

A chemistry teacher was jailed for six years in Britain on Thursday for trying to join Islamic State jihadists fighting in Syria, against the wishes of his family who desperately tried to stop him.

Jamshed Javeed, 30, one of a group of radicalized Muslims from Manchester in northwest England, was arrested in December 2013 as he was about to travel to the Middle East -- after helping his younger brother and three others make the same trip.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal called Thursday on the U.S.-led coalition conducting air strikes against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq to fight the jihadists on the ground, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry noted that military pressure may be needed to oust Syria's President Bashar Assad.

Saudi Arabia, part of the anti-IS coalition, "stresses the need to provide the military means needed to face this challenge on the ground," Faisal said during a press conference with Kerry.

Syrian leader Bashar Assad is not a "credible" partner in the fight against the Islamic State extremist group, French President Francois Hollande said Thursday after meeting Syria's exiled opposition chief.

Hollande said in a statement after meeting Khaled Khoja that Assad "is the main cause of his people's suffering, and for the rise of terrorist groups in Syria."

Moscow said Thursday it would host talks between representatives of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime and opposition figures in April, three months after a meeting between the parties which ended without any concrete results.

"Representatives from a larger section of the Syrian opposition," are expected to take part in the talks, said Alexander Lukashevich, spokesman for the foreign ministry. 

In their battle against "terrorists", countries around the world must root out the injustices that fuel extremism and are used as recruiting tools, the U.N. human rights chief said Thursday.

"The struggle to combat extremist violence must tackle the visions of injustice that fuel it," Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Two Turkish pilots were killed on Thursday when their fighter jet crashed during a training flight, the military said, the second such accident in less than two weeks in the key NATO member.  

An F4 aircraft that took off for a training flight at 0658 GMT crashed at 0750 GMT in the central Anatolian city of Konya, the Turkish Armed Forces said in a statement on its website. 

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat reiterated on Thursday that his party backs the Syrian revolution against the terrorist regime of President Bashar Assad after receiving threats from a Jordanian writer.

“The PSP holds onto its stable stance in support of the Syrian revolution against the regime of terror, murder and threat against the Syrian people,” Jumblat said in a statement, which he issued a day after al-Akhbar newspaper said the writer had threatened the lawmaker.

Police in the Bekaa Valley detained on Thursday an allegedly dangerous terrorist linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The state-run National News Agency reported that Syrian national Hussein Ghurelli, who is linked to ISIL in the Syrian Qalamoun, was detained in a hospital in the Bekaa.