Five more people have died of freezing temperatures in Syria, bringing to 11 the country's death toll in a week-long storm battering the region, a monitoring group said Monday.

Seven children, including twin baby girls, were among the dead, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Some 1,400 people living in France have either joined the jihadist cause in Syria and Iraq or are planning to do so, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Monday.

"There are 1,400 individuals who are involved in the departures for jihad, for terrorism, in Syria and in Iraq," Valls told BFMTV.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam stressed on Monday that the country's front is holding up amid the ongoing dialogue between the political arch-foes, considering the measures against Syrians along the border as merely “humanitarian.”

“Terrorism has no limits but security forces were able to thwart a large number of terror attacks that don't only aim at killing people but planting division,” Salam said in an interview with Ad Diyar newspaper.

Speaker Nabih Berri praised the residents of Jabal Mohsen in the northern city of Tripoli after the suicide attack that targeted a packed cafe on Saturday and stressed that talks between Hizbullah and al-Mustaqbal began showing their fruits.

Local dailies published on Monday quoted Berri as telling his visitors that “we won nine martyrs and the terrorists lost two” men.

France turns its attention Monday to plugging security holes blamed for failing to prevent the deadliest terrorist attack on the country in half a century, after millions united in historic rallies.

In the biggest show of solidarity, in Paris, more than a million people mourned the victims of three days of terror that began with a massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, and ended with 17 people dead.

Iraq's Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi Sunday criticized the "slowness" of the U.S.-led international coalition against Islamic State jihadists in providing military support to his army.

The IS group last year took control of large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria. 

The toll from two car bomb attacks which targeted al-Qaida and Kurdish checkpoints in northern Syria has risen to 20, most of them civilians, a monitoring group said Sunday.

Among the dead in Saturday's attacks were four members of the civil defense force, whose volunteers risk their lives daily to rescue casualties from bombing sites.

Three small girls and an elderly man have died in Syria in the past 24 hours due to bitterly cold temperatures and a week-long storm, a monitoring group said Sunday.

"A girl less than two days old passed away (Sunday) in the southern Aleppo district of Firdous because of the extreme cold," said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Islamic State group fighters attempting to retake a town in northern Iraq held by Kurdish peshmerga forces have killed at least 30 Kurds, an Iraqi military spokesman said Sunday.

The fighting began Saturday as the extremists approached the town of Gwer, just outside of the northern city of Mosul, which the Islamic State group controls, said Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for Iraqi Kurdish forces in Irbil. Hekmat said he had no information about casualties suffered by the Islamic State group.

Interior Minister al-Mashnouq warned on Sunday that the security situation will deteriorate in Lebanon during the upcoming stage due to the ongoing war in neighboring country Syria, accusing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant of standing behind Tripoli's attack.

“Coordination is strong between security agencies to encounter the upcoming stage,” Mashnouq told reporters after a meeting for the northern city of Tripoli's sub-Security Council a day after a double suicide bombing that targeted Jabal Mohsen neighborhood.