Iraqi forces shelled Islamic State targets in Falluja on Tuesday, the second day of an assault to retake the militant stronghold just west of Baghdad, as international concern mounted for the security of civilians.

Egypt’s Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, voiced Al-Azhar’s support to France against terrorism, noting that all people and countries should unite to ideologically fight extremism, according to a statement from al-Azhar Sheikhdom Wednesday.

A Kenyan military official says Kenyan troops in Somalia killed 21 suspected al-Shabab extremists who were plotting an ambush in southern Somalia.

Egypt's Court of Cassation accepted an appeal against a five-year prison sentence and an EGP 100,000 fine for five female Al-Azhar University students arrested while protesting on campus in 2013.

Egypt Al-Azhar's Grand Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb arrived on Tuesday in Paris where he is expected to meet with French President Francois Hollande to discuss efforts to fight extremism and terrorism.

A delegation from Islamic Jihad, a leading Palestinian Islamist organisation, conducted talks on Tuesday in Cairo with Egyptian General Intelligence officials on reconciliation efforts among various Palestinian factions.

The death of the leader of the Afghan Taliban in a U.S. drone strike last week could make the insurgent movement stronger by bringing back dissident commanders and unifying the movement’s ranks, a senior Afghan Taliban figure said on Tuesday.

After a US air strike killed a Tunisian jihadist commander in western Libya in late February, dozens of Islamic State fighters sneaked across the border into Tunisia and attacked an army barracks and police bases in the town of Ben Guerdane.

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."