Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea noted on Monday that the attack launched by gunmen from Syria against Hizbullah positions in the eastern region of Brital demonstrates the need for the government to take the necessary action to guarantee the safety of Lebanese territories.

He told the Central News Agency: “The government should take a binding decision to force Hizbullah to withdraw from Syria.”

The Turkish security forces on Monday used tear gas to push dozens of reporters and Kurdish civilians away from the border zone close to intense fighting for the besieged Syrian town of Kobane.

American hostage Peter Kassig wrote in June that he was "scared to die" at the hands of his Islamic State jihadist captors, his parents have revealed.

The 26-year-old former U.S. soldier was paraded at the end of an IS video released on Friday that showed the murder of British aid worker Alan Henning.

At least 20 jihadists from the Islamic State group were killed on Sunday night in a failed bid to enter the embattled Syrian border town of Kobane, a monitor said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the jihadists were killed after entering an eastern neighborhood of the town and coming under attack by Kurdish fighters from the People's Protection Units.

The leader of the main Syrian Kurdish political party is in Turkey for secret talks with intelligence officials as the battle rages with jihadists for the Syrian town of Kobane, Turkish media said Sunday.

The leader of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Salih Muslim held talks with officials from Turkey's intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Organisation (MIT), in Ankara on Saturday, the Hurriyet daily reported, quoting security sources.

A mortar that crashed into a house on Turkish territory just a few kilometers from a border area inside Syria where Kurdish fighters are battling Islamic State (IS) jihadists wounded five people on Sunday, medical sources said.

The mortar -- whose origin was not immediately clear -- smashed into the house two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the Syria border outside the town of Suruc, medical sources told Agence France Presse.

A 15-year-old French girl was in police custody Sunday after she disappeared from her family home in southern France, suspected of wanting to travel to Syria to wage jihad.

Assia Saidi was "found on Saturday night by her parents in a bar, near Marseille station, where she had been working for a few days," a source close to the investigation told Agence France Presse.

Smoke billowed over the key Syrian border town of Kobane on Sunday as Kurdish fighters supported by U.S.-led air strikes battled to hold back intensified attacks by Islamic State jihadists.

IS fighters seized part of a strategic hill overlooking the town late on Saturday, a monitor said, but their progress was slowed by new strikes from the coalition of Washington and Arab allies.

The United Arab Emirates has expressed surprise after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden suggested the Gulf state had armed and financed jihadists in Syria, along with other regional powers.

Biden's remarks were "amazing and ignore the role of the Emirates in the fight against extremism and terrorism," the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Mohammad Gargash, said in a statement carried late Saturday by the official WAM news agency.

United States Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday apologized to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over comments suggesting that Ankara and other regional powers had financed and armed jihadist organizations in Syria.

Erdogan reacted furiously earlier Saturday at comments made by Biden at Harvard University on Thursday, in which the vice president criticized allies in Turkey and the Arab world for supporting Sunni militant groups in Syria such as the Islamic State (IS) group and al-Qaida-linked Al-Nusra.