Bahraini authorities have arrested three suspects after a firefight in the capital Manama broke out close to U.S. Navy offices, the interior ministry announced Friday.

The trio "resisted police and fired live rounds" at officers on Thursday in the city's busy Juffair district, said a ministry statement published by the official Bahrain News Agency.

Sixteen Indonesians, mostly women and children, have been arrested in Turkey attempting to cross into Syria to join the Islamic State (IS) group, a minister said, the latest case of Indonesians heading to battlegrounds in the Middle East.

The 11 children, four women and one man from the world's most populous Muslim-majority country were detained in the Turkish border town of Gaziantep. Officials did not say when they were arrested.

Hizbullah is reportedly mobilizing and preparing to carry out a wide-range attack on more than one axis in the rebel-held areas in the Syrian Qalamoun region and on Lebanon's Eastern Mountain range.

A source close to Hizbullah revealed in comments to the Italian news agency Adnkronos (AKI) that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Syrian regime forces will back the party's assault on militant posts.

Exhausted by four years of war and economic hardship, Syrians are suffering from an epidemic of mental illness, from suicidal adults to children plagued by recurring nightmares.

The number of Syrians with mental disorders has increased by a quarter since 2011, the health ministry said last month, revealing the extent of the damage for the first time.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday urged the Security Council to take "determined measures" to end the war in Syria, as it entered its fifth year with little prospect for peace.

"The Syrian people feel increasingly abandoned by the world as they enter the fifth year of the war that has torn their country apart," Ban said in a statement.

Kurdish fighters on Thursday held off a fierce assault by the Islamic State group on the strategic border town of Ras al-Ain in northeast Syria, a monitoring group said.

But the jihadists advanced against the Kurdish militia around Tal Tamr, another key town on the same front line in Syria's Hasakeh province.

The United Nations children's fund said Thursday that 14 million children are paying the price for warfare in Syria and neighboring Iraq, with violence and hardship shaping their future.

"With the conflict in Syria now entering its fifth year, the situation of more than 5.6 million children inside the country remains the most desperate," UNICEF said in a statement.

Turkey on Thursday said it had detained an intelligence agent working for one of the states in the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State (IS) for helping three British teenage girls cross into Syria to join the jihadists.

The surprise revelation by Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu appeared aimed at deflecting sustained criticism from Western countries that Turkey is failing to halt the flow of jihadists across its borders.

French officials Thursday launched a formal investigation into a video released by the Islamic State group purporting to show the execution of an Arab Israeli, which featured a French-speaking man.

According to sources close to the investigation, the man is probably Sabri Essid, who has close links to French jihadist gunman Mohamed Merah, the killer of three soldiers, three students and a teacher in southern France in 2012.

Around 200 Assyrian Christians protested outside the U.N. building in Iran's capital Thursday to demand action to halt the Islamic State jihadist group's victimization of their community in Syria and Iraq.

IS has "destroyed Assyrian monuments in Syria and Iraq. We ask the international community, especially the U.N., to hold a Security Council meeting" to decide on military intervention, Hovik Behboud, an  organised, told Agence France Presse.