Bangladesh police said Monday they have arrested a British citizen suspected of entering the country to recruit militants for jihadist groups overseas such as the Islamic State organization.

Officers said Samiun Rahman, a 24-year-old Londoner of Bangladeshi origin, was picked up from a railway station in the capital around midnight on Sunday.

The leader of al-Qaida's Syria affiliate, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has called on Lebanon's Sunnis to defect from the army.

"Sunnis, take your sons away from the army that serves your enemy, and make them join the ranks of the jihadists," al-Jolani, who heads al-Nusra Front in Syria, said in an audio recording on Sunday.

The U.S.-led coalition against jihadists in Syria struck late Sunday the entrance to the country's main gas plant, in an apparent warning to Islamic State (IS) militants to abandon the premises under their control, a monitor said.

"The international coalition has for the first time struck the entrance and prayer area of the Coneco gas plant. It is under IS control, and is the largest in Syria," said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Apparent U.S. missile strikes killed at least seven civilians in northwestern Syria, a watchdog group said Sunday, calling for a probe into possible violations of the laws of war.

Amid unverified claims of civilian casualties from U.S.-led air raids targeting the Islamic State group in Syria, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said Thursday that the American military has "no credible reporting from operations sources" of civilians killed.

U.S.-led coalition warplanes on Sunday kept up their strikes against oil sites in Syria that fund the Islamic State group, as well as targeting the jihadists' command structure.

The air raids came a day after Al-Qaida's Syria affiliate threatened reprisals after a key operative was reported killed.

Former Norwegian premier Jens Stoltenberg will on Wednesday take charge of a revitalized NATO which less than a year ago looked like a Cold War dinosaur in a fast-changing world.

The alliance has a new-found sense of purpose thanks to the Ukraine crisis but Stoltenberg will be aware that it must also face up to many other and longer-term challenges, analysts said.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam hoped that the case of the soldiers and policemen abducted by Islamists from Syria will be kept away from political extortion, reported the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat on Sunday.

He told the daily that he supports holding negotiations with the captors in order to release the hostages, who were abducted in August.

A jihadist who once fought in the Khorasan group offered messages of condolences on Twitter over the death of the Al-Qaida offshoot group's alleged leader, the SITE monitoring group said Saturday.

The messages appeared to provide confirmation that U.S. airstrikes in Syria might have killed Khorasan leader Muhsin al-Fadhli, a long-standing Qaida operative.

Germany will host an international conference next month to mobilize aid for Syrian refugees after the launch of U.S.-led airstrikes, the foreign minister told the United Nations on Saturday.

Millions of Syrians have fled to neighboring countries and beyond, driven from their homes in three-year war and the recent offensive by jihadists.

North Korea's foreign minister on Saturday berated the U.N. Security Council as a forum of lies and double standards, in the first U.N. address by a top Pyongyang official in 15 years.

Foreign Minister Ri Su Yong called for reforming the U.N. Security Council, which has imposed tough sanctions on North Korea over its suspect nuclear program and missile launches.