A security patrol came under fire in an area bordering Syria in the northern Akkar district, the state-run National News Agency reported Friday.

NNA said the vehicle was targeted by gunfire from Syria near the town of Qashlaq.

A top European Union official said he informed Lebanese officials during his visit to Beirut that the presidential and parliamentary elections should be held to have a healthy democracy

Hugues Mingarelli, who is the Managing Director for North Africa, Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Iraq at the European External Action Service, said: “You have a democracy and there are routine elections and a multi-party system.”

A bid by Islamic State fighters to seize the flashpoint Syrian border town of Kobane has stalled, American officials said, with the help of air strikes reported to have killed over 500 jihadists.

U.S. and allied aircraft have flown nearly 6,600 sorties in the air war against the Islamic State (IS) group and dropped more than 1,700 bombs, the American military said Thursday.

Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas said the stance of Lebanon and Jordan at the upcoming Berlin conference on the Syrian refugees will be united.

In remarks to An Nahar daily published Friday, Derbas said that both countries are suffering from the same repercussions of the Syrians crisis that resulted in millions of refugees.

The Army Command will recruit around 1,000 soldiers starting next week as the military is battling Islamist militants, who are entrenched on the outskirts of the northeastern border town of Arsal on the porous Syrian-Lebanese border.

An Nahar newspaper reported on Friday that another 1,000 soldiers will be recruited in January 2015.

The Iraqi army is still months away from staging a major offensive to retake ground lost to the Islamist State group and is regrouping after suffering battlefield defeats this year, U.S. military officials said Thursday.

Iraqi security forces were now able to stage small-scale attacks against the Islamic State group but needed time to plan and train for a larger operation, even with the aid of U.S.-led air strikes, one military official told reporters.

The Syrian army on Thursday recaptured the strategic central town of Morek, nine months after it was seized by rebels and their Al-Qaida allies, a monitoring group said.

The army was backed by militias loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the battle for the town in Hama province, the latest in a string of victories they have scored against rebels seeking his ouster.

The Islamic State has become the world's wealthiest terror group, earning tens of millions of dollars a month from illegal oil sales and ransoms, officials said Thursday.

"We have no silver bullet, no secret weapon to empty ISIL’s coffers overnight. This will be a sustained fight, and we are in the early stages," said undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence David Cohen.

If they let their eyes wander from the blackboard, a handful of children from Kobane can watch their town being bombarded from the windows of their new Turkish school.

The thud of battle for the besieged Syrian border town can be clearly heard in the classrooms of the village school just 400 meters from the frontier, where children struggling to get their heads around being made refugees, must now learn not just a new language but a new alphabet as well.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that 200 Iraqi Kurd peshmerga fighters would travel through Turkey to the flashpoint Syrian border town of Kobane under assault by the Islamic State group.

The regional administration in northern Iraq and Syrian Kurdish group, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) "finally agreed according to information yesterday that 200 peshmerga would be going" to Kobane, Erdogan told reporters in the Latvian capital Riga.