The head of Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church Pope Tawadros II called for restraint and coexistence after a sectarian attack by a mob of Muslims against Christians in Upper Egypt’s Minya governorate.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi called on officials to hold accountable the perpetrators of an attack by a Muslim mob on Christians in a village in Upper Egypt, according to a Thursday statement by his office.

The Coptic Orthodox Coptic Church has said that a mob attacked Christian homes in a village in Minya last Friday, and stripped an older Christian woman of her clothes in the attack. The governor, however, denied the woman was stripped, describing the whole incident as "casual" in a TV interview.

The United States and its allies said they targeted Islamic State on Wednesday with two dozen strikes in Iraq, including four near Falluja, where Iraqi forces have launched a recent effort to retake the city from the militant group.

Egyptian military forces have killed 13 militant suspects and injured four others in different parts of the restive North Sinai Tuesday amid an ongoing military campaign against terrorists, Youm7 reported anonymous security official.

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.