Heavily armed Kurdish peshmerga fighters set off from their base in northern Iraq Tuesday to support militia forces defending the Syrian border town of Kobane from the Islamic State group.

Military trucks loaded with weapons departed from the base northeast of the Iraqi Kurdish regional capital Arbil bound for the besieged town on the Turkish frontier, an AFP correspondent said.

Turkey wants the anti-Damascus Free Syrian Army (FSA) to control the Syrian border town of Kobane if Islamist jihadists are defeated, and not the forces of separatist Kurds or President Bashar Assad, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.

In an interview with the BBC broadcast on Tuesday, Davutoglu called for an "integrated strategy" with the United States to equip and train the FSA and oust Assad from power.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam hoped on Tuesday that the international community is aware of Lebanon's huge financial needs to confront the burden of refugees.

“The refugees are affecting our economy and security ... We call for more funding to confront the repercussions of the refugee crisis,” Salam said at the opening of the Berlin conference on Syrian refugees, which was attended by Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil and Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas.

Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces are ready to depart for Syria to aid the embattled town of Kobane but are being held up by neighboring Turkey, a senior official said Monday.

The town on the Turkish border has become a crucial battleground in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group, which overran large parts of Iraq in June and also holds significant territory in Syria.

Turkey on Sunday arrested five people over the killing of three off-duty soldiers in the Kurdish-majority southeast of the country blamed by the authorities on separatist militants, the official Anatolia news agency.

The three soldiers were gunned down in the middle of the afternoon Saturday while walking in the town center of Yuksekova in the eastern Hakkari province.

The main Kurdish party in Syria "does not want" Kurdish peshmerga fighters from Iraq to come to help it fight Islamic State jihadists trying to overrun the town of Kobane, Turkey's president has asserted according to reports Sunday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Turkish reporters aboard his presidential plane that the Syrian Kurdish party the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has been leading the defense of Kobane, feared losing its influence in northern Syria when the peshmerga arrive.

After more than two months of air strikes, a U.S.-led coalition has prevented the fall of a northern Syrian town to Islamic State jihadists but is still struggling to halt the group's advances on other fronts, experts say.

Since the air war on the IS militants began on August 8, the United States and its allies have few concrete successes to point to as the IS group has continued to roll ahead in western Iraq and tighten its grip elsewhere.

Masked gunmen on Saturday shot dead three Turkish soldiers in the restive Kurdish-majority southeast of the country, the army said, blaming separatist "terrorists" for an attack that threatens to undermine a fragile ceasefire. 

The three soldiers were shot dead on the street in the town of Yuksekova in Hakkari province of Turkey's extreme southeast bordering Iraq and Iran.

Islamic State group fighters made a new bid to cut off the Syrian border town of Kobane from neighboring Turkey Saturday as preparations gathered pace to deploy Iraqi Kurdish reinforcements.

The Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq unveiled plans on Friday for up to 200 well-trained peshmerga to join Syrian Kurdish forces defending Kobane in the coming week.

A 5.2-magnitude earthquake struck northern Greece early Saturday, the country's earthquake observatory said, with no reports of victims or major damage.

The tremor struck at 3:16 am (0016 GMT), with its epicentre 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the northern town of Arta and 249 kilometres northeast of the capital Athens, according to the observatory.