IS overruns town in Syria

Islamic State group jihadists seized a small town in Syria's central Homs province yesterday with help from local rebels and advanced on a majority Christian village, a monitoring group said.

"The Islamic State group easily took control of the village of Maheen, southeast of Homs, after two suicide attacks," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Maheen lies 70 kilometres southeast of the government-controlled provincial capital Homs city, and 35 kilometres east of the Syrian-Lebanese border.

For the past two years, a ceasefire between rebel factions in the town and regime troops at surrounding checkpoints had governed Maheen, reports AFP.

But yesterday, the rebel factions turned against the government fighters and joined ranks with IS jihadists, Abdel Rahman said.

IS launched its assault from the nearby Christian village of Al-Qaryatain, which it seized in August, he added.

From Maheen, the jihadists pushed northeast toward the Christian-majority village of Sadad and the nearby highway running south from Homs to the Syrian capital.

Meanwhile, Kurdish forces are massing in northwest Iraq for an offensive to retake the town of Sinjar from Islamic State militants who overran it more than a year ago, killing and enslaving thousands of its Yazidi residents and triggering US-led air strikes.

Sinjar is a symbolic and strategic prize sitting astride the main highway linking the cities of Mosul and Raqqa - Islamic State's bastions in Iraq and Syria.

Villagers along a main road to the mountain reported seeing dozens of military transport vehicles packed with Kurdish peshmerga fighters pass in recent days.

Preparations for the offensive have been complicated by rivalry between various Kurdish and Yazidi forces in Sinjar.

Also yesterday, at least 18 IS fighters were killed in the town of Harbil, north of Syria's second city Aleppo, in clashes with other rebel groups and air strikes by a US-led coalition, Abdel Rahman said.