Pressure mounted on the Islamic State group Tuesday as a Kurdish-Arab alliance launched a major assault north of the militants' Syrian bastion of Raqa and Iraqi forces advanced on their stronghold of Fallujah.

Pope Francis on Monday embraced the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the prestigious Sunni Muslim center of learning, in a sign that a five-year suspension of important Catholic-Muslim ties was over.

Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb will arrive in Rome on Monday to meet with Catholic Pope Francis, the first meeting of the heads of the two religious institutions since relations were frozen in 2011.

A suicide car bomb killed at least 40 army recruits and injured 60 others in the Yemeni city of Aden on Monday, medics said, in one of the deadliest militant attacks yet on the beleaguered government.

Iraqi government forces on Monday pushed Islamic State militants out of some agricultural areas outside Fallujah as they launched a military offensive to recapture the city from the extremists, officials said.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for multiple bomb attacks in two Syrian cities on the Mediterranean coast that monitors said killed more than 100 people on Monday.

Two people were injured and seven homes and a storage space were burnt after clashes between residents of the Minya province took a sectarian turn on Saturday, security sources told Aswat Masriya.

After years of suspended talks, Pope Francis will receive at the Vatican on Monday Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the grand imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar, the highest seat of Sunni Islamic learning.

Iraq's military said on Sunday it was preparing to launch an offensive to retake the Islamic State stronghold of Falluja and told residents to get ready to leave before fighting started.

The United States carried out an air strike on the leader of the Afghan Taliban, probably killing him in a remote area just inside the Pakistan border in an operation likely to sink any immediate prospect for peace talks.

An Islamic State group spokesman has urged sympathizers in Europe and the U.S. to launch attacks on civilians there if they are unable to travel to the group’s self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq.

A spokesman of a Libyan militia says two suicide bombings by the Islamic State (IS) group have killed 32 of the militia's fighters.

Sitting on a red and green carpet inside a mosque in a suburb of Washington, Nabill Abdulle describes an invisible force. You can't see it, he says, but "it's there."

Syrian government forces and allies including Lebanese Hezbollah fighters seized a strategic town southeast of Damascus from insurgents on Thursday, a monitoring group said.

The U.S. State Department said on Thursday it had designated Islamic State’s branch in Libya as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Islamic State militants are gearing up for a “campaign of terrorist attacks” in France that are likely to see explosive devices placed around areas with large crowds, the head of France’s DGSI internal intelligence agency has warned.

The Islamic State group, on the defensive and under heavy pressure in Iraq, has struck back with bloody attacks in Baghdad, where persistent gaps in security increase the city's exposure.

Powerful Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his armed followers to withdraw from the streets of Baghdad districts that have been hit by deadly bombings claimed by Islamic State, an aide said on Wednesday.

Libyan military forces said on Tuesday they recaptured one of the main checkpoints south of the city of Misrata from Islamic State, reversing some of the gains the militant group made earlier this month.

Air raids carried out by Syrian government warplanes killed at least 13 people from one family in a town in the west of the country on Wednesday, a monitoring group said.

Explosives that detonated in a village in southeastern Turkey last week, killing 16 people, had been intended for use in a suicide bombing in a city, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on Wednesday.