Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II attempted on Monday to reassure Egyptians after the recent attacks on Copts in North Sinai, stressing that the Coptic families that have fled the governorate out of fear of terrorist violence will return to the city "when the time is right." At the start of this month, the Coptic Orthodox Church announced that 143 Christian families had fled North Sinai to Ismailiya after a spate of killings of Christians by Islamist militants in the governorate.

Islamic State's branch in the Sinai Peninsula posted a video on Tuesday depicting the beheading of two men the militant Islamist group said it had found guilty of practicing witchcraft and sorcery. The video, posted on a Telegram channel often used by IS, showed the group forming a religious police unit known as the Hasbah in northern Sinai, where it has waged an insurgency for years. The rugged, thinly populated peninsula borders Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal.

Islamic State-affiliate Province of Sinai released a promotional video on Tuesday showing members of the organization carrying out what it alleges to be Hisba, or religious policing. The group claimed the footage is from locations in North Sinai, which it did not identify. Hisba is defined by religious scholars as the practice of commanding virtue and forbidding vice, professor of Islamic law professor at Al-Azhar University Ahmed Kareema told the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper. He added that Hisba should be conducted by a select few who must be efficient, fair, knowledgeable and capable, describing it as a type of guardianship falling to those who have been entrusted with religious matters.

Egyptian prosecutors announced on Tuesday that a number of defendants accused of involvement in three recent deadly church suicide bombings in Egypt have confessed to the crime, state news agency MENA reported. According to the confessions, the defendants participated in a 2013 sit-in in Cairo's Rabaa El-Adaweya protesting the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi earlier that year, and also received military training in Libya with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State militant group.

A car bomb exploded in Homs on Tuesday morning, Syrian state television said, two days after the city passed back under full government control for the first time since 2011. Authorities destroyed another vehicle rigged with explosives near a Shi'ite Muslim shrine south of Damascus, the broadcaster and other state media outlets reported.

Egypt's general prosecution referred on Sunday 48 defendants to military court on charges of involvement in three recent deadly church bombings in Egypt, according to a statement by Prosecutor-General Nabil Sadek. The accused are also charged with being members of terrorist cells, affiliation with the Islamic State group, and manufacturing weapons and explosives, among other charges, the statement reads.

A bomb blast at a hospital in the Thai capital, Bangkok, wounded 24 people on Monday, on the third anniversary of a 2014 military coup. There was no claim of responsibility for the blast at the Phramongkutklao Hospital, which is popular with retired military officers.

Attorney General Ahmed Sadek referred 48 defendants to military trial on charges of collaborating with the Islamic State group in Egypt and established two affiliated cells in Cairo and Qena. The charges include involvement in the deadly Palm Sunday church bombings in April and an attack on Abbassiya Cathedral in December 2016.

Turkey's state-run news agency says two people suspected of being members of the Islamic State group have been killed in an Ankara police operation.

An Iraqi envoy met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Thursday to explore direct military cooperation against Islamic State (IS) militants, Syrian state media said. The Syrian state news agency SANA said Iraqi national security adviser Faleh al-Fayad and Assad discussed "practical measures for military coordination on both sides of the border in light of the victories the Iraqi army is achieving in Mosul".

Following the recent war declaration by North Sinai’s second largest group, Al-Sawarka, against the IS-affiliated group Sinai Province, anonymous militants — believed to be members of the group — made an interim checkpoint south of Rafah city in North Sinai to disseminate a hard copy of a statement. According to residents in the city who preferred to remain anonymous, the statement disseminated by the militants is actually issued by Sinai Province and is addressed to North Sinai’s prominent tribe of Al-Tarbiyeen.

Islamic State (IS) militants are planting bombs near front doors in Mosul to prevent civilians leaving, a federal police commander and witnesses said on Wednesday, as Iraqi forces make their final push against the Islamist militants after seven months of fighting. Trapped in a shrinking area of the city, the militants are increasingly using the several hundred thousand civilians under their control as human shields to avoid being targeted or perhaps tarnish what Iraqi leaders describe as imminent victory.

Iraqi forces have recaptured nearly 90 percent of west Mosul from the Islamic State (IS) militant group and other Islamist militants in the city are on the "brink of total defeat", officers said Tuesday. Iraqi forces launched the massive operation to retake Mosul from IS nearly seven months ago, fighting their way to the city held by Islamist militants, retaking its eastern side and then attacking the west.

Egypt's Grand Mufti Shawky Allam said on Tuesday that Muslim scholars need to engage in a reform of religious discourse, adapting their interpretations of Islamic law in line with changes in society, according to state-run news agency MENA.

Malaysia’s most-wanted member of the Islamic State militant group has been killed in Syria, police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said on Monday, citing intelligence information. Muhammad Wanndy Mohamed Jedi, 26, who was on a US list of global militants, was the alleged mastermind behind a grenade attack on a Kuala Lumpur bar last June which injured eight people. It was the first and so far only Islamic State attack that caused casualties in Malaysia.

Pope Francis has appealed for penitence and prayers for the end of conflicts and wars he says are disfiguring “the face of humanity.”

Heavy shelling by Islamic State militants killed at least seven people in the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor on Sunday night, a war monitoring group said.

Cairo Criminal Court on Saturday set a June 10 session to issue its verdict against the defendants charged in the assassination of late top prosecutor general Hesham Barakat.

More than 1,500 rebels and their family members left the devastated district of Qaboun on the edge of the Syrian capital Damascus after more than two months of aerial strikes and artillery shelling, rebels and state media said on Sunday.

After Congress passed a new law allowing Sept. 11 victims’ families to sue Saudi Arabia in US courts, opponents mounted an expensive political campaign, including paying American military veterans to visit Capitol Hill and warn lawmakers about what they said could be unintended consequences. What few people knew, including some of the recruited veterans themselves, was that Saudi Arabia’s government was largely paying for the effort, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite a World War II-era US law requiring lobbyists to immediately reveal payments from foreign governments or political parties, some of the campaign’s organizers failed to notify the Justice Department about the Saudi kingdom’s role until months afterward, with no legal consequences.

Muslim cleric and former undersecretary to the Minister of Religious Endowments Salam Abdel Galil is facing huge backlash after he said that Christians and Jews are "apostates" on the television show he presents on privately-run channel El-Mehwar. Abdel Galil was explaining pertinent verses from the Quran about non-believers. Local media outlets have reported that Abdel Galil will stand trial on June 25. It is believed that he was referred to trial on charges of "religious contempt" as his statements were derogatory toward Christianity and Judaism. Reports indicate that several lawyers notified the prosecution of the cleric's inflammatory remarks.