Sultan Muslim, a Syrian Kurd, had no doubt what to name her seventh child when he was born, safely in Turkey, after a harrowing month-long flight from her home in Kobane: Obama.

Desperate to flee the flashpoint Syrian border town, the heavily pregnant mother, her husband and six other children made it across the frontier just in time for the boy's arrival. 

Suspicious envelopes containing a yellow powder were sent Friday to the Belgian, Canadian and German consulates in Istanbul, prompting a security alert, officials said.

One person who opened the envelope at the Canadian mission was directly exposed to the unknown substance, which was now being analysed by experts, Turkey's disaster management agency AFAD said.

Syria's Kurds reacted coolly Friday to the prospect of hundreds of rebel fighters joining their defense of the border town of Kobane, suggesting they should focus on fighting jihadists elsewhere.

Turkey said on Friday that 1,300 Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters -- who are battling to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- would travel to Kobane, located just across its border.

A top European Union official said he informed Lebanese officials during his visit to Beirut that the presidential and parliamentary elections should be held to have a healthy democracy

Hugues Mingarelli, who is the Managing Director for North Africa, Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Iraq at the European External Action Service, said: “You have a democracy and there are routine elections and a multi-party system.”

Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas said the stance of Lebanon and Jordan at the upcoming Berlin conference on the Syrian refugees will be united.

In remarks to An Nahar daily published Friday, Derbas said that both countries are suffering from the same repercussions of the Syrians crisis that resulted in millions of refugees.

If they let their eyes wander from the blackboard, a handful of children from Kobane can watch their town being bombarded from the windows of their new Turkish school.

The thud of battle for the besieged Syrian border town can be clearly heard in the classrooms of the village school just 400 meters from the frontier, where children struggling to get their heads around being made refugees, must now learn not just a new language but a new alphabet as well.

European Union leaders will call on Turkey to respect Cyprus's sovereign rights, expressing "serious concern" at fresh tensions between the two countries over oil and gas exploration, a draft summit document showed Thursday.

The statement, to be issued at an EU summit in Brussels, comes after Cyprus on Monday slammed Turkey for sending a survey vessel into an area where the Cypriot government had already licensed exploratory drilling for oil and gas.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that 200 Iraqi Kurd peshmerga fighters would travel through Turkey to the flashpoint Syrian border town of Kobane under assault by the Islamic State group.

The regional administration in northern Iraq and Syrian Kurdish group, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) "finally agreed according to information yesterday that 200 peshmerga would be going" to Kobane, Erdogan told reporters in the Latvian capital Riga.

A Malaysian court on Thursday charged three men with supporting the Islamic State after they were arrested while attempting to leave the country to join the militants fighting in Iraq and Syria.

The charges against the trio -- an architect and a technician, both 26, and a 42-year-old trader -- come amid concerns over the group's growing influence in Southeast Asia.

A Turkish woman was arrested on suspicion of blasphemy and inciting religious hatred after allegedly stepping on the Koran and then posting the picture on Twitter, media reported on Wednesday.

The arrest came after Melih Gokcek, Ankara's controversial mayor from the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), launched a criminal complaint against the 38-year-old-woman, who uses the Twitter handle @kedibiti (cat lice).