Burundi's army is accused of killing dozens of people on December 11, according to Amnesty International.

The rights group says that some of the dead were killed extra-judicially by members of the security forces.

"The violent repression that took place on 11 December represented a dramatic escalation in scale and intensity from previous security operations," the Amnesty report says.

Fire was exchanged across the Israeli-Lebanese border after the death of a senior member of the Hezbollah movement.

Samir Qantar was killed in a rocket attack, suspected to have been carried out by Israel, near Damascus, Syria.

The Israeli army said it fired artillery shells into Lebanon after rocket attacks from across the border.

Mr Qantar, who was Druze, was jailed in Israel in 1979 but released as part of a prisoner swap with the Lebanese militant group in 2008.

Turkey says it will pull more of its troops out of northern Iraq, following a partial withdrawal earlier this week, soon after US President Barack Obama urged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to "de-escalate tensions" with the Iraqi government.

The Turkish foreign ministry said it acknowledged a "miscommunication" with Iraq over the deployment of its forces, after Baghdad strongly objected to the deployment at the Bashiqa camp near the Islamic State held city of Mosul, where Turkey is engaged in training Kurdish peshmerga fighters.

The International Criminal Court has transferred two former Congolese militia leaders, convicted of war crimes, to a prison in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga are the first ICC convicts to be allowed to serve sentences in their home country, the BBC reports.

The United Nations Security Council unanimously approved a resolution endorsing an international road map seeking a peaceful political solution.

The resolution, endorsed on Friday, supported a plan agreed by world powers in Vienna on how to help transition Syria form civil war to a political solution.
 
The US Secretary of State John Kerry told the 15 nation council that,

Thousands of Iraqis protested against Turkey’s deployment of troops to a base near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Saturday.

The deployment of Turkish troop into Iraq earlier this month sparked uproar in Baghdad, which appealed to the United Nations Security Council to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Turkish troops from northern Iraq.

Turkey has refused, stating that the troops were part of an international mission to train and equip Iraqi forces fighting Islamic state militants, reports Reuters.

Almost 800 cases of rape, torture and murder were committed over eight months in the Central Africa Republic by armed groups, reported the UN mission MINUSCA on Friday.

MINUSCA’s first human rights report said 775 violations and abuses affecting at least 785 victims were committed between September 2014 to May 2015.

The 25 page report found that “serious challenges remain given the lack of progress towards the disarmament of armed groups and the absence of a functioning state authority in much of the territory.”

A former Rwandan mayor who was wanted for genocide was arrested by the Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday.

Ladislas Ntaganzwa, accused of orchastrating the killing of tens of thousands of people during the 1994 genocide, was indicted in 1996 and accused of genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide as well as extermination murder and rape.

Rwanda’s Prosecutor General Richard Muhumza, in a statement made after the arrest, said,

Syria’s political and armed opposition agreed to meet with the Assad regime for talks seeking a political solution to the conflict next month announced the chair of the opposition groups conference in Saudi Arabia.

Over 100 members of Syria’s opposition parties and rebel fighting groups agreed, at the end of two days of discussion in Riyadh, to attend talks with President Assad’s government, reports Reuters.