At least 12 people were killed Tuesday, including three children, in Syrian regime air strikes on the Ain Tarma area outside Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Ain Tarma is under rebel control and is one of the areas around the capital that regime forces have been battling to recapture.

Turkey on Tuesday accused the main Kurdish political party in Syria of "torturing" Syrian Kurds who fled to Turkey when Islamic State jihadists launched their assault on the border town of Kobane.

Turkey has so far taken in some 200,000 refugees from Kobane just a few kilometers (miles) from the border with Syria where Kurdish fighters have been battling the jihadists to defend the town.

At least 10 Syrian soldiers were killed on Tuesday in clashes with Islamic State group jihadists in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, a monitor said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the deaths came in fighting in Hawijat Sakr on the Euphrates River.

Few people had ever heard of Kobane before recent weeks, but the once-sleepy Syrian border town has become a crucial symbolic battleground in the fight against Islamic State jihadists.

Desperate to preserve their hopes of autonomy in the face of the jihadists' expanding "caliphate", Kobane's rag-tag Kurdish defenders have been fighting for nearly a month to save the town.

France's president Tuesday urged Turkey to open its border to allow reinforcements to reach the besieged city of Kobane and called for more help to those fighting the advance of the Islamic State group.

Francois Hollande stressed that "all countries concerned", including those not in the coalition fighting the Islamic State group, should provide weapons to those battling the jihadists.

Just five kilometers (three miles) separates Dursun Nahsen from her son Resad. But this short distance is the difference between her refuge in the relative peace of Turkey and the deadly battle for the town of Kobane.

And it is this wrenching separation, which begins at the barbed wire of the Turkish-Syrian border, that Dursun Nahsen is finding increasingly hard to bear.

The military court adjourned on Tuesday the trial of suspects charged with terrorism and the killing of Lebanese soldiers near the southern city of Sidon last year after two of them, including a footballer, failed to attend the hearing.

The trial of the detainees and fugitives was adjourned to November 18. One of the suspects, a Roumieh prison inmate, refused to attend the session at the military court, the state-run National News Agency reported.

Two senior security officials in the Syrian city of Homs have been fired after a bombing that killed dozens of schoolchildren, stirring rare public protests in a loyalist area, a monitor said Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the head of the local military security branch and the chief of the city's security committee had been dismissed from their posts.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam urged the European Union on Tuesday to increase its development assistance to Lebanon to consolidate stability in the country.

“The European Commission and EU member states should be aware of the danger of threats that Lebanon is facing and their social and economic repercussions,” said Salam.

British police on Tuesday said they had arrested six people on terrorism charges in an investigation linked to the conflict in Syria, where hundreds of British jihadists are fighting.

The three men and three women were detained in Farnborough and Portsmouth in Hampshire, southern England, and in Greenwich in southeast London.