Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq has been invited to the Gulf Cooperation Council's interior ministers' meeting scheduled to be held in Doha next week, al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Al-Mashnouq will be the “guest of honor” in the meeting that would also be attended by five cabinet ministers from the GCC countries, the daily said.

France and Saudi Arabia are close to signing a $3 billion arms deal for Lebanon, the Elysee Palace said Monday following talks between President Francois Hollande and the Saudi crown prince.

"It will not be signed Monday but it is being finalized," an aide to the president said.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Tuesday said "extreme force" was justified in battling Islamic State militants as he played down reports that an Australian plane delivering humanitarian aid in Iraq came under fire.

Australia will "in coming days" join ally the United States in an international effort to transport weapons to Kurdish forces fighting IS extremists in northern Iraq.

Iraqi forces regained control on Tuesday of part of a key highway linking Baghdad to the north where Amnesty International said jihadists had carried out a wave of ethnic cleansing.

Raids by Syrian forces hunting suspected Islamic State infiltrators in the northeast town of Hasakeh have sparked an exodus of more than 60,000 civilians in three days, a monitor said Monday.

Hasakeh is split between zones controlled by President Bashar Assad's forces, Kurdish groups and militants from the radical IS group, which is sowing terror in both Syria and neighboring Iraq.

Macedonian police said Monday they have detained more than 100 Syrian and Iraqi immigrants, among them women and children, hiding in a train transporting coal from the Greek port of Thessaloniki.

"The immigrants are mainly from Syria and Iraq and they came to Greece from Turkey," Ivo Kotevski, spokesman for the Interior Ministry told AFP.

Prime Minister David Cameron announced tougher measures Monday against Britons planning to fight in Iraq and Syria, and battle-hardened jihadists who could return to launch attacks on home soil.

Cameron said his government would draw up measures to ban suspects who are British nationals from returning to the UK, while police will get enhanced powers to temporarily strip departing suspects of passports at the border.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday defended a watershed decision to send arms to Iraqi Kurds battling jihadist militants, saying Europe's own security was at stake.

Merkel told parliament that Germany's decision to break with its post-war tradition of refusing to send weapons into conflict zones was crucial in strife-torn Iraq, the scene of "inconceivable atrocities" against civilians.

Saudi Arabia's crown prince arrived in Paris Monday for talks with President Francois Hollande likely to touch on a Saudi-financed French package of arms for Lebanon and the wider jihadist threat in the region.

Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who is also deputy prime minister and defense minister, will meet Hollande on Monday and will be treated to an official dinner at the Elysee presidential palace.

Islamic State jihadists have used cluster munitions in Syria in at least one location and Syria's regime is continuing to use the widely banned weapon, Human Rights Watch said Monday.

The New York-based group, citing reports from local Kurdish officials and photographic evidence, said IS fighters had used cluster bombs on July 12 and August 14.