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.

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.

Jakarta's Christian governor has been sentenced to two years in jail for blasphemy, a harsher-than-expected ruling critics fear will embolden hardline Islamist forces to challenge secularism in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority nation. Tuesday's guilty verdict for Basuki Tjahaja Purnama comes amid concern about the growing influence of Islamist groups, who organized mass rallies during a tumultuous election campaign that ended with Purnama losing his bid for another term as governor.

The first federal appeals court to hear a challenge to President Donald Trump's revised travel ban appeared unconvinced that it should ignore the Republican's repeated promises on the campaign trail to bar Muslims from entering the country. An attorney for the president urged the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday to focus on the text of the religiously neutral executive order rather than use campaign statements to infer that the policy was driven by anti-Muslim sentiment.

German authorities say they have arrested two suspected Islamic extremists, one of whom administered the strategically important dam in eastern Syria for IS.

Egypt's Giza Criminal Court has sentenced Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie and two other defendants to life in prison, two defendants to five years in prison and acquitted 21 others in the ‘Rabaa operations room’ retrial. In April 2015, Badie, along with 13 other defendants, was sentenced to death while 37 others were sentenced to life in prison for setting up an "operation room" at a protest camp supporting ousted president Mohamed Morsi in Cairo's Rabaa Al-Adawiya area in the summer of 2013.

Giza Criminal Court sentenced on Monday Muslim Brotherhood (MB) Supreme Guide Mohamed Badei and two others to life in prison, 15 defendants to 5 years rigorous imprisonment and acquitted 21 others in the case publicly known as the "Rabaa Task Force" case.

Two alleged militants affiliated to the “Hasm” and “Lewaa Al-Thawra” movements were killed in a gunfight with security forces in Tanta, north of Cairo, on Saturday, according to the Ministry of Interior.

The head of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Abdul Hasib, has been killed in an operation led by Afghan special forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar, President Ashraf Ghani announced on Sunday.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is in talks with the Trump administration to keep American troops in Iraq after the fight against the Islamic State group in the country is concluded, according to a US official and an official from the Iraqi government.

An Egyptian criminal court ordered on Thursday the release of prominent Muslim Brotherhood leader and businessman Hassan Malek on EGP 20,000 bail pending trial on charges of harming the country’s economy and financing the banned Brotherhood group.

Days after concluding his visit to Egypt, Roman Catholic Pope Francis II described the country as a “sign of hope” for fraternity, not only historically, but also in the present day. During an address in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, the pope thanked the people of Egypt for their warm welcome and the Egyptian authorities for their “extraordinary commitment” to ensuring the success of his journey.