The first time Wael Amr got on a plane was not quite what he had hoped for. Air travel in films led him to imagine how glamorous it would be to leave Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province for an exotic holiday abroad.

The Cairo Criminal Court on Sunday handed life imprisonment sentence to 13 people over joining a terrorist group and ordered placing 16 defendants in the case on terror lists.

The U.S. military’s Central Command says three known Islamic State hiding places have been destroyed in rural Iraq.