Syrian President Bashar Assad said he had invited Hizbullah militants to fight alongside his regime but he denied the presence of Iranian troops in Syria in an interview with French television broadcast Monday.

Iran is Assad's main regional ally, and Tehran has acknowledged sending military advisers to assist his forces in their fight against rebels and jihadist militants.

Former Minister Michel Samaha pleaded guilty to all charges against him on Monday, admitting in court that he had transported explosives from Syria for use in attacks in Lebanon.

MTV channel said that Samaha confessed to all charges against him including plots to assassinate Lebanese officials.

Lebanon received on Monday the first shipment of $3 billion worth of French arms under a Saudi-financed deal to boost the country's defensive capabilities to combat terror threats, along its northeastern border in particular.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who arrived in Lebanon on Sunday night and was welcomed by his Lebanese counterpart Samir Moqbel at Beirut Rafik Hariri International Airport, reaffirmed in a brief speech the importance of preserving stability of Lebanon, pointing out that the army is paying the price of pressure enforced by terror groups

Australia and Iran will share intelligence to track foreign fighters working with the Islamic State group in Iraq, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Monday, as lawmakers urged caution.

In the first trip to Iran by an Australian minister in more than a decade, Bishop said it would be an informal arrangement.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Monday that he will use a trip to Turkey for Anzac Day commemorations to push Ankara for increased security on its border with Syria and Iraq.

The border is one of the preferred routes for foreign fighters seeking to join Islamic State (IS) jihadists, with Western powers criticising Turkey for not doing enough to seal it off.

An ex-intelligence officer under the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was "the strategic head" behind the Islamic State group and drew up the blueprints for the jihadists' capture of northern Syria, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

Former colonel Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, who was better known as Haji Bakr and was killed by Syrian rebels in January 2014, "had been secretly pulling the strings at IS for years", according to the magazine.

A mother and her five children were among at least 19 civilians killed on Sunday in Syrian regime bombardment of the southern province of Daraa, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the six members of one family died in the rebel-held area of Dael.

More than 30 percent of young Arabs are jobless because of unrest in many Arab nations and not enough investment, a top labor official said on Sunday.

"The unemployment rate among Arab youth until the age of 30 years exceeds 30 percent," the director general of the Arab Labor Organization Ahmad Mohammed Luqman told AFP.

Young Syrian men in regime-controlled areas are using any means necessary, including violent protests, to avoid military conscription -- even if they support the government.

More than 80,000 soldiers and other pro-regime fighters have been killed in the four-year-old conflict, out of a total of roughly 220,000 dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

With conflicts raging across the Middle East, the U.S. is seeking to reassure its Gulf allies that it has a regional strategy which will be bolstered, not shredded, by any Iran nuclear deal.

The U.S. administration appears increasingly caught in a game of whack-a-mole as it confronts a series of complex challenges, with Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen just the latest complication in a regional tinderbox pitting Sunnis against Shiites, and even Sunni against Sunni.