Clashes between Daesh and al-Nusra Front terrorists have been reported at the ad-Deb valley near the border between Syria and Lebanon.

Fierce clashes have broken out between militants of Daesh and the al-Nusra Front terrorist group near the Syrian-Lebanese border. Both sides are sustaining casualties, a source close to Hezbollah told RIA Novosti on Monday.

"Clashes resumed between Daesh and al-Nusra Front militants at the ad-Deb Valley in the mountainous region of Arsal," the source said.

Seven suspected jihadist cell members have been arrested in Spain in a series of raids across southern provinces. The ring is being accused of funding terrorism as well as money laundering for Islamic State and Al-Nusra terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.

The cell was also responsible for running arms, military equipment, bomb material, and electronic devices disguised as humanitarian shipments destined for the jihadist groups in the Middle East, Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz announced, confirming the arrest of seven cell members on Sunday.

Riled by a meeting between a US official and members of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which controls the Syrian town of Kobane, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told Washington to choose between Turkey and, as he put it, the "terrorists."

A delegation featuring Brett McGurk, the United States' envoy to the coalition it leads against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), met the YPG over the last weekend in January. The YPG took full control of Kobane late last June, in what was a powerful symbol of Kurdish resistance.

Haitian President Michel Martelly has stepped down from office, with no successor in place following several postponements of presidential elections, media reported Monday.

According to the CNN, Martelly delivered a speech to the country's National Assembly, in which he said he was resigning, on Sunday.

The first round of the elections took place on October 26, with Jovenel Moise from Haitian Tet Kale Party and Jude Celestin from Alternative League for Haitian Progress and Empowerment gaining nearly 33 and 25 percent of votes respectively.

Has Danny Abdul Dayem been resurrected?

In Rami Jarrah's recent Ana Press academy award winner, "ISIS wherefore art thou ISIS" [Edited title] we saw a surprise guest appearance, either from Danny Abdul Dayem's doppelganger or Danny himself has been brought out of retirement by Soros backed ANA Press.

The situation with the refugee influx in Europe can reach catastrophic levels in the summer, as some two million people could claim asylum in the continent this year, a French lawmaker said Monday.

The European Union is currently struggling to manage a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa for Europe.

"This year my forecast is 1.5-2 million [refugees]. I am afraid it will come true," Thierry Mariani told the Ogoniok magazine.

1. Netanyahu heads the only undeclared nuclear weapons entity on the planet yet still ludicrously alleges that non­ nuclear Iran is trying to exterminate the state of Israel with its 100s of warheads in its Dimona secret arsenal, (all of which are outside the inspection of the IAEA), in an abortive effort to damage the agreed Iran peace deal, painstakingly negotiated by the UN Security Council members and the EU. His convoluted political machinations, in Washington and Europe, have resulted in ignominious failure as Iran rejoins the international community.

2. His government also refuses to be a party to both the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions (CWC / BWC) to which all EU members and most other UN states are signatories

3. His right­wing, extremist government supports the continued illegal occupation and settlement of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in violation of international law, in addition to continuing a blockade of essential materials to 1.8 million in Gaza that has received global condemnation.

The American military has announced new bombardments of more Daesh (ISIL) militant targets in Iraq and Syria.

The United States and its allies targeted ISIL militants in Iraq with 14 strikes on Friday and two strikes in Syria, the US military said on Saturday.

Five of the strikes in Iraq were near Mosul, hitting four ISIL tactical units and command and control nodes. The strikes in Syria were near Ayn Isa, hitting a militant vehicle and four buildings, according to Reuters.

Since September 2014, the US along with some of its allies has been conducting air raids against what are said to be the Daesh terrorists inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or the United Nations.

The air assaults in Syria are an extension of the US-led aerial campaign against purported Daesh positions in Iraq, which started in August 2014. The terror group seized swathes of land in Iraq a couple of years ago after ravaging Syria.

This is while many critics including Iraqi officials have time and time again questioned the efficacy of these airstrikes.

Reports say US-led attacks have killed scores of civilians in Syria ever since. Washington itself has admitted to some.

Syria has been grappling with a foreign-backed militancy since the early 2011. The violence has claimed over 260,000 lives and driven millions of Syrians into neighboring states from where many have been trying to reach Europe.

Daesh Takfiris have executed 300 people in Iraq's embattled northern province of Nineveh. "Daesh terrorists executed 300 people by firing squad in Mosul," said Mahmoud al-Sourji, a spokesman for Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, on Sunday, adding that all of them were "Iraqi police personnel, army troopers and civilian activists," Arabic-language al-Sumaria satellite television network reported. Sourji further said that Daesh lives in a state of tension in Mosul and the mass execution confirmed the group's fear of people's rising in the militant-held city.

On Saturday, the terrorists publicly amputated the right hands of three teenagers accused of theft. The incident, reportedly, sparked the outrage of citizens, as the three boys were underage and the penalty was handed down by the group's so-called Sharia Court without investigation.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi forces managed to slay a Daesh military commander, called Abu Leil, along with four of his companions in Garma district, east of the city of Fallujah in Anbar province. A day earlier, another terrorist commander, called Shobaib Abu Majd al-Kanani, was also killed along with eight other Daesh commanders in an airstrike in Nineveh. Wreaking havoc in Iraq since June 2014, the terror group has recently been losing ground to the country's army forces.

Here's my twenty-first-century rule of thumb about this country: if you have to say it over and over, it probably ain't so. Which is why I'd think twice every time we're told how "exceptional" or "indispensable" the United States is. For someone like me who can still remember a moment when Americans assumed that was so, but no sitting president, presidential candidate, or politician felt you had to say the obvious, such lines reverberate with defensiveness. They seem to incorporate other voices you can almost hear whispering that we're ever less exceptional, more dispensable, no longer (to quote the greatest of them all by his own estimate) "the greatest." In this vein, consider a commonplace line running around Washington (as it has for years): the U.S. military is "the finest fighting force in the history of the world." Uh, folks, if that's so, then why the hell can't it win a damn thing 14-plus years later?

If you don't mind a little what-if history lesson, it's just possible that events might have turned out differently and, instead of repeating that "finest fighting force" stuff endlessly, our leaders might actually believe it.After all, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it took the Bush administration only a month to let the CIA, special forces advisers, and the U.S. Air Force loose against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's supporters in Afghanistan. The results were crushing. The first moments of what that administration would grandiloquently (and ominously) bill as a "global war on terror" were, destructively speaking, glorious.

If you want to get a sense of just how crushing those forces and their Afghan proxies were, read journalist Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, the best book yet written on how (and how quickly) that war on terror went desperately, disastrously awry. One of the Afghans Gopal spent time with was a Taliban military commander nicknamed -- for his whip of choice -- Mullah Cable, who offered a riveting account of just how decisive the U.S. air assault on that movement was. In recalling his days on the front lines of what, until then, had been an Afghan civil war, he described his first look at what American bombs could do:

"He drove into the basin and turned the corner and then stepped out of the vehicle. Oh my God, he thought. There were headless torsos and torso-less arms, cooked slivers of scalp and flayed skin. The stones were crimson, the sand ocher from all the blood. Coal-black lumps of melted steel and plastic marked the remains of his friends' vehicles.

"Closing his eyes, he steadied himself. In the five years of fighting he had seen his share of death, but never lives disposed of so easily, so completely, so mercilessly, in mere seconds."

The next day, he addressed his men. "Go home," he said. "Get yourselves away from here. Don't contact each other."

"Not a soul," writes Gopal, "protested."