GREATEST WAR EVER:

Syria on Saturday issued letters of complaint to the United Nations in which it denounced the day's Israeli strikes on Syrian army targets, accusing the Jewish state of conspiring with local "terror groups," the Ynet website reported.

In the morning the Israeli army hit three Syrian artillery targets in the Golan Heights, in a response hours after five projectiles landed in open ground in Israel as a result of spillover fire from the fighting in Syria.

The forces fighting the remnants of the Islamic State group in Syria have tacit instructions on dealing with the foreigners who joined the extremist group by the thousands: Kill them on the battlefield.

As they made their last stand in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, an estimated 300 extremists holed up in and around a sports stadium and a hospital argued among themselves about whether to surrender, according to Kurdish commanders leading the forces that closed in. The final days were brutal -- 75 coalition airstrikes in 48 hours and a flurry of desperate IS car bombs that were easily spotted in the sliver of devastated landscape still under militant control.

No government publicly expressed concern about the fate of its citizens who left and joined the Islamic State fighters plotting attacks at home and abroad. In France, which has suffered repeated violence claimed by the Islamic State -- including the Nov. 13, 2015, attacks in Paris -- Defense Minister Florence Parly was among the few to say it aloud.

"If the jihadis perish in this fight, I would say that's for the best," Parly told Europe 1 radio last week.

Those were the orders, according to the US.

"Our mission is to make sure that any foreign fighter who is here, who joined ISIS from a foreign country and came into Syria, they will die here in Syria," said Brett McGurk, the top US envoy for the anti-IS coalition, in an interview with Dubai-based Al-Aan television.

"So if they're in Raqqa, they're going to die in Raqqa," he said.

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