The number of people killed in an explosion and in clashes between militiamen and locals in a town east of Tripoli has risen to 40, an official said on Wednesday.

US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters advanced Thursday into the Islamic State jihadist group's bastion of Manbij in northern Syria, sparking fierce street fighting as they push to take the city. Backed by air strikes by the US-led coalition bombing IS in Syria and Iraq, fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance entered Manbij from the south, a monitoring group said.

A police sergeant was shot dead and a low-ranking policeman injured Wednesday afternoon in the North Sinai governorate capital Al-Arish, Egypt's interior ministry announced.

Congo called Wednesday for its diplomats in France to be better protected after the country's embassy in Paris was attacked by a mob that broke into the mission and started a fire.

Government-backed forces in Libya have made significant gains against the fighters of so-called Islamic State.

Hundreds of Christians and Muslims had sohour (a meal Muslims have before dawn and starting the fast in Ramadan) together at the Evangelical Church in Mukattam Tuesday.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) has compiled a document recording 70 cases of Egyptians who converted to the Shiite sect of Islam, discussing the struggles faced by Shia Muslims due to official religious policy, discrimination and violence from members of Egypt's majority Sunni population. It documents human rights violations towards Shias that occurred between January 2011 and May 2016.

Pope Francis has invited a dozen refugees to join him on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica for his general audience to press his demand for Europe to welcome more migrants.

Egypt’s grand Mufti Shawqi Allam said that one can learn combat sport and be trained to practice it in a harmless way, but it is “religiously forbidden” to seek professionalism in a way that harm and bring severe disability to one another, reported Youm7.

Fierce clashes in Libya between pro-government militiamen and Islamic State militants (IS) in the city of Sirte and an explosion at a depot near the capital, Tripoli, left more than 60 dead in just one day, a spokesman and a Libyan state news agency reported Wednesday.

The Islamic State group has launched a counteroffensive in Syria's northern province of Raqqa, retaking wide areas the militants recently lost to government troops.

Bahrain has revoked the citizenship of the spiritual leader of the kingdom's Shi'ite Muslim majority, the state news agency reported on Monday, prompting protests outside his home and a sharp rebuke from an Iranian paramilitary chief.

A Harvard professor who caused a huge splash when she unveiled a small fragment of papyrus that she said referred to Jesus being married now says it's likely a forgery. Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King presented the piece of papyrus in Rome in 2012. The fragment, written in Coptic, includes the phrase, "Jesus said to them, My wife."

The Islamic State militant group launched a counter attack against fighters trying to capture the Syrian city of Manbij on Monday, inflicting heavy casualties on the U.S.-backed forces, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the militants said.

Taliban fighters in the southern Afghan province of Helmand stopped vehicles and detained at least 25 people, officials said on Tuesday, as the insurgents continued a series of abductions on Afghanistan's highways over the past few weeks.

A number of militants opened fire at a policeman outside his home in Arish city, North Sinai, leaving him dead, according to a Monday statement by the Interior Ministry.

Turkish border guards shot dead at least 11 Syrians, mostly from one family, as they tried to cross into Turkey from northwestern Syria, activists and a monitoring group said on Sunday.

More than 20 people were killed in separate bomb attacks in Afghanistan on Monday, including at least 14 when a suicide bomber struck a minibus carrying Nepalese security contractors in the Afghan capital, officials said.

Libya's UN-backed unity government condemned an attack by a newly-formed militia group on eastern military forces close to key oil facilities, as clashes resumed on Sunday for a second day.

Somalia's al Shebab militants killed five police officers in a border region in northeastern Kenya on Monday, a regional official said.