The death toll from a suicide bombing in a Baghdad shopping district has risen to over 150, fueling calls for security forces to crack down on Islamic State sleeper cells blamed for one of the worst ever single bombings in Iraq.

Russia and the United States held fresh talks on Saturday on ways of cooperating to end the five-year conflict in Syria as intensive Syrian government air strikes killed at least 40 civilians in a town northeast of Damascus.

At least 82 people were killed and 200 injured in two bombings that hit Baghdad around midnight Saturday, nearly all of them in a blast targeting a busy shopping area as they celebrated Ramadan, police and medical sources said Sunday.

US-backed rebels on Sunday accused Al-Qaeda-linked fighters of storming their headquarters in northwestern Syria and kidnapping their commander and dozens of other combatants.

At least two people were killed and seven wounded in a night-time car bomb attack targeting a security chief in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, a news agency and medical sources said Sunday.

One the most organised, well-financed, and state-backed political movements in the post-25 January Revolution political scene, Egypt’s Islamists received a blow to both their project and organisation on 30 June 2013 after thousands took to the streets demanding the removal of then president Mohamed Morsi.

Six Egyptian pilgrims were killed and 14 others wounded in Saturday's bus crash in Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian Community in Saudi Arabia announced on its Facebook page Sunday.

Six Egyptian border guards were killed Thursday morning in a shootout with smugglers in the desert near Egypt's western border, the army said in a statement.

The Lebanese government warned on Tuesday of a heightened terrorist threat after eight suicide bombers targeted a Christian village at the border with Syria, the latest spillover of that country's conflict into Lebanon.

Indian counter-terrorism officials on Wednesday arrested five men on suspicion of plotting a series of attacks across the country on behalf of Islamic State, two intelligence officials said.

A Coptic Christian priest was killed earlier Thursday in North Sinai, Egypt's interior ministry announced. Reverand Rofael Moussa, the priest of St George Church in Al-Arish, was killed early morning, shot down by a group of unknown assailants, the ministry said in a statement issued Thursday afternoon.

At least 27 policemen were killed Thursday and 40 wounded after a bomb attack claimed by the Taliban struck a convoy of buses transporting police cadets in Kabul, the interior ministry said. The attack comes little over a week after 14 Nepali security guards who were heading to work at the Canadian embassy were killed in a massive blast that left their yellow minibus spattered with blood.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi urged Arab and Muslim countries to unite in the face of terrorism and called for purging religious discourse of extremism.

Twenty-three Turkish citizens and 13 foreign nationals were killed by suicide bombers in an attack at Istanbul's main international airport on Tuesday night, a Turkish presidential official said.

The Cairo Criminal Court on Wednesday adjourned the trial of 494 protesters, who were arrested as violence broke out around Al-Fatah Mosque after the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in. The case was adjourned till October.

The Islamic State group (IS) pushed back an offensive by US-trained Syrian rebels on a key route linking militants territory in eastern Syria to Iraq, a monitor said Wednesday.

A Minya court judge ordered on Tuesday the release on bail of eight defendants, who were arrested in connection to attacks on Christians in Minya’s Karam village in May.

Eleven Kurdish rebels and three of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards were killed in clashes near the Iraqi border, the Fars news agency reported on Tuesday.

A group of clerics in Pakistan has declared marriage between transgender individuals permissible in Islam, saying they have a right to be buried in Muslim ceremonies, according to a copy of a religious edict Reuters obtained on Monday.

A suicide bomber detonated explosives at a Sunni mosque near Baghdad where worshippers were gathered for prayers, killing at least nine people, officials said on Tuesday.

Three coordinated Islamic State bomb attacks on Yemeni government forces killed 38 people in the southern port city of Mukalla on Monday, medics and security sources said.