Iraq's Kurds said Thursday Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was "hysterical" and not fit to run the country, further dimming the prospect of a new leadership uniting to face jihadist fighters.

The worsening political discord comes three days ahead of a planned parliamentary session meant to revive the process of replacing what has effectively been a caretaker government since April elections.

Hizbullah denied on Thursday that its fighters carried out a “military show off” in the northern Bekaa Valley, calling for coordination between the Lebanese and Syrian army to control the border and prevent gunmen from freely moving.

“It's normal for the party to monitor security and unusual activities at towns like al-Labweh, Nabi Othman and Hermel that Hizbullah has presence in,” Hizbullah's Loyalty to Resistance bloc lawmaker Walid Sukkarieh told al-Joumhouria newspaper.

Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq stressed on Thursday that the security plan enforced in the northern city of Tripoli is “holding up,” pointing out that arrests occur according to arrest warrants.

“We will not yield to the pressure exerted by the street” to free detained suspects, Mashnouq said in comments published in As Safir newspaper.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat stressed on Wednesday that Lebanon cannot have a confrontational presidential nominee, urging an agreement on a consensual candidate to end the deadlock in the country's top post.

"I don't see an end to the (presidential) crisis because both nominees are confrontational. They have to understand that neither of them can be a confrontational candidate,” Jumblat said in an interview on Al-Jazeera television on Wednesday evening.

Two 16-year-old twin girls from a Somalian family in Britain have disappeared from their family home and are feared to have traveled to Syria, counter-terror police said Wednesday.

Salma and Zahra Halane vanished from the family home in Manchester, northwest England, two weeks ago. They flew to Turkey and are thought to have crossed the border into war-torn Syria.

Italian-Swedish diplomat Staffan de Mistura is to be named the new U.N. mediator for Syria on Wednesday, taking on the Herculean task of finding a political solution to the devastating civil war, diplomats said.

He is to replace Lakhdar Brahimi who resigned in May after two rounds of peace talks yielded no concrete results and as the conflict escalated into a fourth year, killing more than 162,000.

The U.S. Treasury placed a United Arab Emirates company on its sanctions blacklist Wednesday for selling specialty oil products to the Syrian government.

Boosting the pressure on the regime of Bashar Assad, the Treasury at the same time named for sanctions two alleged front companies for Syria's Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC).

Twenty members of the Islamic State (IS) were killed in Syrian air force raids Wednesday against the jihadists' bastion in Raqa, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The report comes after Syrian rebels killed at least 14 people, among them women, among them women, in the village of Khatab in the central province of Hama overnight, state media and the Observatory said.

France on Wednesday presented a bill aimed at strengthening anti-terrorism laws to stop increasing numbers of aspiring jihadists from traveling to fight in Syria.

The new bill, presented by Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to the council of ministers, came as a 48-year-old woman was charged under anti-terrorism laws after visiting Syria thrice where her son is fighting.

Hundreds of tonnes of chemicals "likely" to have been used by Syria to make the deadly nerve gas sarin were exported by British firms in the 1980s, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Wednesday.

Hague said the chemicals, which can be used legitimately for making plastics and pharmaceuticals, were exported by unnamed British companies to Syria between 1983 and 1986.