The White House Monday praised Vice President Joe Biden for being big enough to admit his mistakes, after he apologized to two key allies over an embarrassing diplomatic gaffe on the Middle East.

Biden called leaders in the two states, key members of the U.S. coalition taking on the Islamic State group, after he was quoted as saying that they had financed and armed the Sunni jihadists.

The U.S. military has started flying attack helicopters against Islamic State militants in Iraq for the first time, officials said Monday, marking an escalation in the air war that puts American troops at higher risk.

Canada's foreign minister pledged Can$10 million (US$9 million) on Monday to help victims of sexual violence and human rights abuses that he said were perpetrated by the Islamic State (IS) group.

A former French intelligence officer who defected to Al-Qaida was targeted by U.S. strikes in Syria last month, U.S. press group McClatchy said, in a report almost immediately denied by Paris.

According to the report, European intelligence sources describe the former agent -- who allegedly defected from either French military intelligence services or the country's foreign spy agency the DGSE -- as the "highest ranking defector ever to go over to the terrorist group."

The United States said Monday it arrested a 19-year-old American at a Chicago airport as he attempted to leave the country to join Islamic State jihadists fighting in Iraq and Syria.

Mohammed Hamzah Khan, who arrived at O'Hare International Airport Saturday with a roundtrip ticket to Istanbul, was charged with one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, the Justice Department said.

The Turkish government last week won parliamentary authorization to send its armed forces into Syria to fight jihadists but imminent action is unlikely as it sets the West tough conditions for military cooperation.

Islamic State (IS) jihadists have advanced to the Syrian town of Kobane, just a few kilometers from the Turkish border yet still NATO member Ankara appears in no hurry to use force.

The new head of NATO said Monday it would protect member Turkey against attacks from the jihadist Islamic State group, which is fighting to capture territory in Iraq and Syria near the Turkish border.

"Turkey is a NATO ally and our main responsibility is to protect the integrity, the borders of Turkey," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters.

Syrian government forces on Monday seized control of a strategic area outside Damascus used by rebels to fire mortar shells at the capital, state media and a monitor said.

State television broadcast live images from Dakhaniyeh, southeast of Damascus, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that "rebels have withdrawn".

Kurdish fighters battling Islamic State (IS) jihadists for the Syrian town of Kobane employed a new tactic when a female suicide bomber blew herself up in an attack claimed to have killed dozens of militants.

The young woman, a fulltime fighter with the Syria-based Kurdish rebel group the People's Protection Units (YPG), killed herself in the attack on Sunday, Kurdish sources told AFP.

Several rockets targeted on Monday the Bekaa town of Hermel, the state-run National News Agency reported.

According to NNA, two rockets fired from Lebanon’s Eastern Mountain range, on the Lebanese-Syrian border, landed on the residential area in Hermel.