The local unit of Al-Qaida's Syrian branch in the tinderbox town of Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border pledged loyalty Wednesday to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, giving ISIL control over both sides of the frontier.

The move is also significant because it reflects how ISIL is fast gaining the upper hand in eastern Syria, where it has been locked in combat with fighters from Al-Qaida franchise Al-Nusra Front and allied local rebels virtually all year.

The gray Nissan Murano used in the bombing that targeted last week an Internal Security Forces checkpoint in the eastern town of Dahr al-Baydar was reportedly rigged with explosives in the eastern border town of Arsal, As Safir newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The daily said that the army intelligence is investigating if any illegal border crossings between the Syrian town of al-Qalamoun and Arsal are still accessible or if the car was prepared with explosives in Arsal.

Some 120 refugees from war-torn Syria are due to begin arriving in Uruguay in the coming weeks, officials here said on Tuesday.

The director of the country's office for human rights, Javier Miranda, is in Geneva finalizing with U.N. officials the details of an arrangement that will see the first 40 Syrians arrive "in September or October," a governmental spokesman said.

Rebel mortar fire on a government-held district of Damascus killed five people Tuesday, state media said, as a car bomb killed one person in a pro-government area of third city Homs.

Five people were also wounded by the mortar fire on the south Damascus district of Kissweh, the state SANA news agency reported.

Syria's foreign ministry said Tuesday that new EU sanctions were a "desperate, miserable" reaction to an early June presidential election that kept Bashar Assad in power.

The criticism came a day after EU foreign ministers agreed that 12 Syrian government ministers would be hit with travel bans and asset freezes "given their responsibility for serious human rights violations."

Turkey on Tuesday said it has banned entry to more than five thousand foreign jihadists suspected of seeking to head to Syria to join radical Islamist groups fighting the Syrian regime.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his Islamic-rooted government was taking "all the measures" to stem the flow of jihadists from abroad, who were "using Turkey as a transit point" to enter war-torn Syria.

Israeli cabinet ministers on Tuesday accused forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar Assad of being behind a weekend cross-border attack that killed an Arab Israeli teenager.

The attack prompted Israel to hit back with tank fire and air strikes, which Syria said killed four of its soldiers, in the most serious cross-border hostility between the two sides for months.

Iraqi air strikes killed at least 38 people on Tuesday as security forces held off attacks on a strategic town and an oil refinery, as Washington said the first batch of U.S. military advisers has arrived in Baghdad.

In the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, morning air strikes killed at least 19 people and wounded at least 17, officials said, while further raids in the evening killed six more.

Speculation encircled the bombing that targeted an army checkpoint at the entrance of Beirut's southern suburbs as Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq insisted that the security situation in Lebanon is “under control.”

An army communique said on Tuesday that a suicide bomber in a white Mercedes-Benz 300 model, carrying license plate J/3247784, detonated himself on an army checkpoint on Tayyouneh roundabout.

Lebanese authorities have deported a Frenchman, who was planning to head to Syria to carry out a suicide bombing there, As Safir daily reported on Tuesday.

The man, who was not identified, was arrested at Rafik Hariri International Airport a few weeks ago by Lebanese security forces after receiving a tip from a European agency, it said.