Turkey has fired artillery into Syria to retaliate after a cross-border rocket from the war-torn country had slammed into a mosque, Turkish media said Monday amid heightened tensions.

The rocket from Syria wounded an elderly Syrian refugee woman in Hatay province on Sunday, where several mortar rounds also hit the ground, without causing harm, the Dogan News Agency reported.

Syrian army troops recaptured on Monday a key position in coastal Latakia province, a regime bastion, state television said, as rebels press a campaign in the region.

"Syrian army units have full control of Observatory 45 in the north of Latakia province and are continuing to pursue terrorist groups," the state broadcaster said, quoting the military.

German authorities arrested three people with alleged ties to a Syrian radical group Monday in police raids across the country, the federal prosecutor's office said.

Two of the suspects, a German and a Turk, are believed to have traveled to Syria last year and joined the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which German authorities consider to be a foreign terrorist organisation.

State Commissioner to the Military Court Judge Saqr Saqr issued around two hundred arrest and search and investigation warrants against suspects who had breached security across Lebanon.

According to the state-run National News Agency reported on Monday, Saqr issued 200 arrest and search and investigation warrants last week against 200 criminals from the northern city of Tripoli, the city of Bekaa and Beirut.

Young Syrian rebel commander Mohammed limps from an injury suffered in "insane" army shelling of his native Qalamun region as he tells of his perilous evacuation across the border into Lebanon.

Mohammed, who gave only one name, is being treated in the small border town of Arsal, which has turned into a refuge for more than 100,000 Syrians fleeing the war in their country and a makeshift rehabilitation center for scores of wounded fighters.

The Israeli army has revamped a training program for army logistics cadets to prepare them for any future war in Lebanon or the Gaza Strip and to avoid a repeat of failures in the 2006 conflict with Hizbullah.

The Jerusalem Post said the two-week exercise placed around 180 cadets in simulated combat conditions, in a bid to avoid the same critical logistics failures experienced by the Israeli army in the July war of 2006 with Hizbullah.

President Michel Suleiman expressed regret on Sunday over the decision by some parties not to attend all-party talks a day before they kick off at the Baabda Palace under his auspices.

“I hope that the parties that decided to boycott the National Dialogue would participate in upcoming sessions,” Suleiman said during the Alphabet Day Conference held in the city of Jbeil.

Attacks in Sunni-majority areas of Iraq killed nine people Sunday, exactly a month before parliamentary polls with violence at its worst since the country emerged from a bloody sectarian conflict.

The latest violence came hours after seven soldiers were shot dead at a checkpoint in a late-night attack by militants in the north, the latest in a surge in bloodshed that has killed more than 2,200 people already this year.

Around 200 families fled the villages of Ras al-Maarra and Flita in the strategic Qalamun region into the border town of Arsal after the Syrian regime controlled the area amid the governments absence.

Arsal deputy municipal chief Ahmed Fleiti said in comments published in the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat on Sunday that the 200 families crossed the border.

Two Spanish journalists taken hostage in Syria by an al-Qaida-linked group walked free after six months in captivity and were heading back to Spain on Sunday, their friends and colleagues said.

El Mundo correspondent Javier Espinosa, 49, and freelance photographer Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, 42, were "freed and handed over to the Turkish military", the Spanish newspaper said on its website.