US President Barack Obama said on Monday recent territory losses by Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria show the extremist group will be defeated and pledged to increase US support for the moderate opposition in Syria's civil war.

The Salafi-led Nour Party has demanded the controversial anti-terrorism bill approved by the government to be suspended until it has been subjected to social debate.

A suicide bomber from Syria's al Qaeda offshoot the Nusra Front blew himself up in a Syrian army outpost in a contested neighbourhood in the divided northern city of Aleppo and killed at least 25 soldiers and allied militia and injured scores, a monitor said.

The Egyptian army has killed 241 terrorists in North Sinai over the past five days, the army's spokesman said in a statement on Monday.

An official source said that Egypt is among the least countries in the world that implement the death penalty, as onlyseven executions were implemented in the past two years. The sources predicted that the implementation of death sentences would increase in the coming period in light of the ongoing war on terrorism.

The Malian Islamist rebel group Ansar Dine claimed it carried out a series of attacks against U.N. peacekeepers and Malian army targets in the country’s capital, Bamako, and border areas near Ivory Coast and Mauritania.

The Cairo Criminal Court submitted the grounds on which former president Mohamed Morsi and five others were handed death sentences. They were given the sentences on charges of participating in storming Egyptian prisons, attacking police facilities, and killing security personnel.

The Egyptian army has killed 241 militants over the past five days, military spokesman Mohamed Samir announced on Monday.

Cairo Criminal Court sentenced on Sunday 23 Muslim Brotherhood supporters to ten years in prison over violence at the Media Production City (MPC) in August 2013.

Egypt’s military launched air strikes and ground operations that killed 25 Islamist militants in North Sinai on Sunday, security sources said, as the country grapples with an increasingly ambitious insurgency based in the region.

The Supreme Administrative Court on Sunday upheld an earlier verdict in which it turned down a petition demanding the dissolution of the Salafi-led Nour Party, citing its religious background that allegedly violates the political parties law.

The ultra-conservative Salafist Nour Party has launched a campaign against extremism and terrorism. "Egypt stronger than terrorism' aims to raise public awareness of the dangers of extremist ideas and protect the youth against them," Nour Party leader Younis Makhyoun said in a statement on Sunday.

Two civilians were killed and a third was injured in a blast in North Sinai's Sheikh Zuweid on Saturday, police sources said, raising the civilian death toll on Saturday to six.

With wooden crosses around their necks and others tattooed on their arms, several dozen Iraqi Christians are training to recapture their homes overrun by the Islamic State jihadist group.

Minya University President Gamal Eddin Abul Magd said that the university had sent a letter to Mohamed Saad al-Katatny, a leading figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, to inform him that his contract had been terminated.

Publishing news on the prosecution’s investigations into the Monday assassination of late Attorney-General Hisham Barakat has been banned, state-owned MENA reported.

Egypt launched air strikes on Islamist militant targets in the Sinai peninsula on Thursday, killing 23 fighters a day after the deadliest clashes in the region in years, security sources said.

Nine Muslim Brotherhood leaders were killed by police on Wednesday, with conflicting reports on the conditions of their death.

The Sinai-based militant group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis claimed responsibility for a string of attacks which targeted security checkpoints and facilities in North Sinai early Wednesday.

As reports of deaths from around the North Sinai town of Sheikh Zuweid continue to mount, it seems that Wednesday’s events represent the largest-scale terrorist attack that the Egyptian army has ever confronted in the peninsula.

Exactly three years ago, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was sworn in as Egypt’s first democratically elected civilian president before the land’s Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC).