After having used the Internet profusely for propaganda and recruitment, jihadist organisations have realized that investigators are gleaning crucial information online and are increasingly concealing their web presence, experts say.

Apart from recent orders given to fighters to limit their exposure, erase the footprint of their online activity and avoid revealing too many place names or faces, the Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front groups are increasingly using the "Dark Web" -- the hidden part of the Internet protected by powerful encryption softwares.

A U.S.-led coalition air strike killed a chemical weapons specialist with the Islamic State group in Iraq who once worked for Saddam Hussein, U.S. military officers said Friday.

The air raid carried out last Saturday near Mosul took out Abu Malik, whose training "provided the terrorist group with expertise to pursue a chemical weapons capability," the military said in a statement.

Al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria battled Western-backed rebels Friday as the jihadists pressed their bid to seize control of northern areas, a monitoring group and rebels said.

The fighting comes nearly three months after al-Nusra Front expelled another group of Western-backed opposition fighters from Idlib province.

With their town liberated but largely destroyed by battles that drove Islamic State jihadists out, thousands of Syrian residents of Kobane are settling into Turkey's newest refugee camp for an indefinite stay.  

Opened on Sunday just several kilometres from the Syrian border, the new compound near the town of Suruc is the largest refugee camp yet in Turkey, and has begun taking in some of the estimated 200,000 people who fled Kobane after it came under IS attack in September.

Belgian police have arrested four people during nationwide raids aimed at smashing groups that recruit jihadists to fight in Syria, prosecutors said Friday.

Police carried out 22 raids in areas across Belgium but found no weapons or ammunition, the federal prosecutor's office said in a statement.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat lamented on Friday the Baabda Declaration, stressing that abiding by the dissociation policy is no longer possible.

“Implementing the declaration among the circumstances (the country is passing through) is impossible... We should be patient,” Jumblat said in an interview published in An Nahar newspaper.

Greek Orthodox leader Youhanna X Yazigi has stressed that the election of a new president in Lebanon would create stability and help the authorities confront the regional turmoil.

Yazigi, who is the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, expressed regret that Lebanese lawmakers have failed to elect a successor to President Michel Suleiman, whose term ended in May.

The Lebanese government is mulling to ask the anti-Islamic State coalition to expand its operations to the Lebanese-Syrian border area from where extremists are carrying out attacks on the Lebanese army, a report said Friday.

High-ranking political sources told the Kuwaiti al-Seyassah newspaper that the cabinet is studying to officially ask the coalition to carry out air raids on the IS and al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front militants.

Lebanon will file a complaint at the United Nations over the Israeli shelling on Lebanese territories and the death of a Spanish peacekeeper with the U.N. force in southern Lebanon, media reports said on Friday.

According to al-Akhbar newspaper, Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil asked Nawaf Salam, Lebanon's Permanent Representative to the U.N., to file the complaint.

Kurdish fighters killed 22 jihadists around Kobane Thursday, days after recapturing the Syrian town, but the Islamic State group still controls hundreds of villages in the area, a monitor said.

"Nineteen IS members were killed in fighting against the (Kurdish) People's Protection Units (YPG) in the hills surrounding Manaz to the west of Kobane," said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.