The Turkish parliament on Saturday renewed a bill allowing the military to intervene in Iraq and Syria if faced with national security threats — a move seen as a final warning to Iraqi Kurds to call off their Monday independence referendum.

For the second time in 10 years, Sammye and Drew Geer are being deployed with an Illinois Army National Guard unit to the Middle East.

Days after marking its third year of operations in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the French military on Saturday announced its first combat death in the anti-Islamic State fight.

Iran has successfully tested a new ballistic missile that can carry multiple warheads and travel up to 1,242 miles, state media reported Saturday.

Pakistan's army says "terrorists" across the border in Afghanistan have opened fire on a newly built border post in recently cleared Rajgal Valley, killing a young officer.

Turkey's official news agency says Istanbul police have detained 36 people as alleged members of the Islamic State group.

Iran is working to restore a lost link in its network of alliances in the Middle East, trying to bring Hamas fully back into the fold after the Palestinian militant group had a bitter fall-out with Iranian ally Syria over that country's civil war.

After nine years of fits and starts, dismissals and reinstatements, a federal lawsuit filed by one-time inmates at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq against civilian interrogators who worked there is moving ahead.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard on Friday unveiled its latest ballistic missile capable of reaching much of the Middle East, including Israel, while the country's president vowed that Tehran would press ahead with its missile program in defiance of U.S. demands to the contrary.

Hosting a Los Angeles event with the son of Bahrain's king, two prominent U.S. rabbis let something slip to those in attendance: the ruler of the island nation thinks the longtime boycott of Israel by Arab countries should end.

A Russian submarine in the Mediterranean fired cruise missiles at al-Qaida-linked militant positions in northwestern Syria on Friday, a day after militants wounded three Russian troops in the area, the defense ministry said in Moscow.

The vote in Syria is likely to anger Turkey, which has been concerned about increasing Kurdish power in northern Syria since the country's crisis began in 2011. Turkey considers the Kurdish forces a terrorist organization, linked to its home-grown Kurdish insurgency.

The spokesman for Iraq's mostly Shiite paramilitary troops known as Popular Mobilization Forces says they have joined the battle against Islamic State militants in the contested province of Kirkuk.

TV shows used as training guides and “cut-and-paste activities” were among the flaws found by a U.S. government watchdog report as it examined why Afghanistan’s forces are unable to secure the country after 15 years of international assistance.

Generals with the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State met face-to-face with their Russian counterparts recently to discuss ways to keep forces they support in Syria separated on a shrinking battlefield, a U.S. military spokesman said Thursday.

Approximately 2,200 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers began quietly deploying this month, part of a long-discussed troop surge that involves more than 3,000 U.S. servicemembers on top of the more than 10,000 already serving in Afghanistan.

Analysts and former senior Israeli military officers say Israel is showing that it will act with force to protect its interests, while using just enough of it to limit its enemies without sparking a war. But it's a precarious line to tread, and even a small misstep could lead to conflict, they say.

U.N. investigators will help Iraq collect evidence to build potential war crimes cases against Islamic State extremists, under a resolution the Security Council approved Thursday.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said Pakistan's role is a key part of President Donald Trump's plan announced last month to end America's longest war and eliminate a rising extremist threat in Afghanistan.

In a push at dawn, Iraqi forces launched an operation on Thursday to retake the town of Hawija — one of the last extremist strongholds in Iraq — from the Islamic State group, according to a statement from the Iraqi prime minister's office.

Iran's president warned Wednesday that his country will "respond decisively" to any violation of the agreement that reins in its nuclear program and called President Donald Trump's "ignorant, absurd and hateful rhetoric" about Iran unfit for the United Nations.

President Ashraf Ghani said the U.S. strategy is three-fold: double the size of the Afghan commando force, bolster Afghanistan's military airpower, and overhaul the military leadership as part of broader reform of Afghan security forces.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he has made a decision on whether to walk away from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran but refused to say what it is, setting the stage for a particularly contentious meeting of the parties to the agreement.

Researchers say Islamic State supporters have found an ephemeral platform to share propaganda: Using Instagram's "stories" feature, which causes posts to disappear in 24 hours.

The battle for the Islamic State group's de-facto Syria capital, Raqqa, has reached its "final stages," the U.S.-backed force leading the assault said Wednesday.

A group of hackers suspected of working in Iran for its government is targeting the aviation and petrochemical industries in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and South Korea, a cybersecurity firm warned Wednesday.

With President Bashar Assad seemingly poised to survive the Syrian civil war, Israeli leaders are growing nervous about the intentions of his Iranian patrons and their emerging corridor of influence across the region.

Iraqi forces backed by U.S. airstrikes began an assault on the Islamic State in western Anbar province on Tuesday, breaching one of the last two militant strongholds in the country that is believed to be a possible hiding place of the group's elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

A small group of U.S. troops carrying out a missile-defense mission in Israel is taking up residence inside a new barracks building on an Israeli base in an effort to improve living conditions for troops.

The U.S. military acknowledged it has closed an outpost in southern Syria in recent days amid reports that American forces and their contingent of Syrian proxies had pulled out from an important base in the area.

Insurgents led by an al-Qaida-linked group launched one of their widest offensives yet Tuesday against Syrian pro-government forces, which responded with heavy airstrikes targeting hospitals and first responders.

Iraq's ethnically-mixed and contested city of Kirkuk was on a nighttime curfew on Tuesday after clashes erupted there the previous night between Kurds and Turkmen amid preparations for the controversial Kurdish independence referendum next week, a local Turkmen official said.

Syrian troops battling the Islamic State militant group crossed to the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in Deir el-Zour on Monday, threatening a potential faceoff with the U.S.-backed forces operating there.

The Pentagon will send more than 3,000 new troops to Afghanistan as part of President Donald Trump’s new strategy for the 16-year war, but the Defense Department will not provide specific details about those upcoming deployments, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Monday.

Israel and the U.S. inaugurated the first American military base on Israeli soil on Monday, which will serve dozens of soldiers operating a missile defense system.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Sunday that Iran would respond strongly to “any wrong move” by the United States on the multilateral nuclear deal struck in 2015.

An Afghan official says a roadside bomb has killed at least six people in the southern Kandahar province.

An independent U.N. human rights body has ruled that Iran's detention and prosecution of two American-Iranian nationals violated their internationally recognized right to a fair trial. It has called for their immediate release.

The Pentagon is taking additional steps to ensure that U.S. and Russian battlefield commanders are able to directly communicate with one another after an airstrike on U.S. proxy forces near Deir al-Zour, Syria, that wounded several fighters Saturday, the United States' highest -ranking military officer said.

Western forces embedded with the SDF were not injured, the U.S. military said. The SDF is supported by a U.S.-led international coalition of forces to defeat IS militants in Syria and Iraq.

An Islamic State suicide attack on a coalition base in northern Iraq was foiled Saturday without Iraqi or coalition casualties, officials said.

Four die in market in Khost, while two more killed in Laghman.

It says three children were killed and nine wounded in the incident, but Yemeni security officials have said as many as four were killed and 10 wounded.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed the attack.

The Security Council is putting the final touches on a resolution that would authorize U.N. investigators to help Iraq collect evidence to prosecute extremists from the Islamic State group for possible war crimes.

Even though President Donald Trump announced his strategy for the war in Afghanistan in August, the Pentagon and NATO are still trying to map their way forward in the nearly 16-year-old conflict, according to U.S. officials.

Turkish nationals make up half of the hundreds of families being held in a camp near Mosul for suspected links to the Islamic State group, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press Saturday.

Iraq is prepared to intervene militarily if the Kurdish region's planned independence referendum results in violence, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Saturday.

Backed by Russian warplanes and fighters from Iranian-backed militias, the Syrian government has enjoyed a series of battlefield successes in recent weeks. It has seen an increase in the territory it controls from a low of only 19 percent of the country earlier this year to currently about 48 percent.

A U.S.-backed force in Syria said a Russian airstrike wounded six of its fighters Saturday near the eastern city of Deir el-Zour while in southeast Syria, Syrian troops and their Iran-backed allies began a new offensive aiming to capture areas along the Iraq border under the cover of Russian airstrikes.

Syria's Deir el-Zour is rising from the ashes after a grueling three-year siege by the Islamic State group.

The German prosecutor’s office in Kaiserslautern said Friday it is looking into a report that the Pentagon used Ramstein Air Base to transport weapons covertly to rebel fighters in Syria — an allegation, that if true, might have broken German law.

Iraqi security forces have freed most of northern Iraq from the grip of the Islamic State. But U.S. and Iraqi officials warn that thousands of militants remain in the country and are ready to wage a ferocious fight in a desert region bordering Syria.

Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Afghanistan and Pakistan are being recruited by Iran to fight with President Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria, lured by promises of housing, a monthly salary of up to $600 and the possibility of employment in Iran when they return, say counterterrorism officials and analysts.

An Iraqi military commander says troops have launched a multi-pronged operation to capture a town near the Syrian border from the Islamic State group.

Government troops and their allies intensified an offensive Friday against Islamic State militants in central Syria, trying to consolidate their control on the area.

A car carrying explosives rammed into a convoy of international troops in southern Afghanistan on Friday killing a Romanian soldier and wounding two others, the Romanian defense ministry said.

A suspected U.S. drone strike struck a compound in a northwestern tribal region along the Afghan border on Friday, killing three suspected militants and wounding two others, an army officer and two security officials said.

Albania's defense minister says it plans to send a third infantry platoon in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military has detained an American captured in Syria fighting for the Islamic State, the Pentagon said Thursday.

Qatar's emir is persona non grata to four U.S.-allied Arab states that accuse his wealthy Gulf nation of sponsoring extremists, but he recently received a warm welcome at the sprawling military base his troops share with thousands of American soldiers.

Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan welcomed a new command sergeant major on Thursday.

A peculiar irony accompanies the U.S. military’s diminished presence and role in Iraq. With fewer troops, often at safe distances from the front lines, medics caring for them here are expanding their roles and skills.

Russia fired a salvo of cruise missiles from the Mediterranean on Thursday and said they struck Islamic State targets in eastern Syria. Activists there said at least 20 civilians were killed in what they described a "fanatical" bombardment — blaming some of it on Russia and some on the United States.

Gunmen stormed a checkpoint and a restaurant crowded with Shiite pilgrims, killing at least 60 people and wounding 83 in a coordinated attack in southern Iraq, the provincial governor said.

Warplanes from allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia have begun joint war games that are coinciding with separate drills between Egypt and both the United States and Russia.

The leader of Yemen's Shiite rebels is threatening to attack territory in the United Arab Emirates, a key member of a Saudi-led coalition fighting to defeat his Iranian-backed forces and restore an internationally recognized government.

The Trump administration on Thursday extended sanctions relief to Iran, avoiding imminent action that could implode the landmark 2015 nuclear deal, even as President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused Tehran of not respecting the entire agreement.

The Air Force dropped more than 500 weapons in Afghanistan last month — the largest monthly tally since 2012 — continuing an uptick seen throughout this year, according to newly released military data.

Analysis

The collapse of Islamic State in its most important Iraqi strongholds has brought a rare moment of hope. It is also a moment of peril, as Iraq emerges from the fight against the militants only to be confronted with the same problems that fueled their spectacular rise in 2014.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is consulting U.S. allies in Europe as he seeks a way to toughen restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program a month before President Donald Trump faces a deadline to decide whether to walk away from what he’s called “the worst deal ever.”

Baghdad's central criminal court sentenced a Russian national to death by hanging for his membership in the Islamic State group, the court said in a statement.

Syria's civil war has been one of the modern world's most brutal conflicts and one of its most heavily filmed. Hundreds of thousands of amateur videos uploaded to YouTube document every heartbeat of the war over the past seven years, from momentous events like cities under bombardment to intimate scenes like a father cradling his dead children.

Egypt's military said Wednesday that troops killed five militants who attacked a checkpoint in the northern Sinai Peninsula, where an Islamic State assault on a convoy two days earlier killed 18 police.

Former business associates of Michael Flynn have told lawmakers that he traveled to the Middle East in 2015 as part of a private proposal to build nuclear power plants across the region, a trip that the former Trump administration national security adviser never disclosed during his security clearance process.

A suicide bomber struck outside a cricket stadium during a match in Afghanistan's capital Wednesday, killing at least three people and wounding seven others, officials said.

Israel's leader on Wednesday said his country supports Kurdish independence ahead of a key referendum on the matter.

Egypt's defense minister, on a visit to Seoul, announced that his country has cut military ties with North Korea, according to a report by South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

A top American military commander is declassifying 81 locations of unexploded bombs dropped by the U.S.-led coalition in the battle to oust Islamic State militants from the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Syrian opposition activists and witnesses said Tuesday that several thousand Syrians stranded on the border with Jordan have fled one makeshift camp for another, running from shelling and nearby fighting between Syrian rebels and government forces.

A Qatari diplomat says "dogs" backed by "some regimes" are waging a media campaign against his country, a thinly veiled jab at Gulf countries that drew a sharp rebuke at an Arab League meeting.

The leader of Iraq's Kurdish region defended an independence referendum planned for later this month during a visit Tuesday to the oil-rich Kirkuk province, the epicenter of a long-running dispute with the central government.

Israel's Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a 2015 law that granted exemptions from military service to ultra-Orthodox men, in a move that could re-ignite long-standing tensions between Israel's politically powerful ultra-Orthodox community and the secular Jewish majority.

Syria's government signed a contract with an Iranian company on Tuesday to import five gas-fired power plants to the war-battered city of Aleppo, in an early sign of the major role Tehran is expected to play in Syria's reconstruction.

A Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up near the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan on Monday, a day on which servicemembers marked the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Yair Netanyahu, the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, removed an anti-Semitic meme from his Facebook page on Sunday after an outcry from Israeli politicians and Jewish community leaders in the United States.

Nancy Hatch Dupree was a rare American fixture in Afghan life and lore for half a century; a petite, adventuresome historian and bonne vivante whose efforts to preserve Afghan history and artifacts from the vicissitudes of conflict survived the Soviet invasion, the civil war and the Taliban.

U.S.-backed Syrian fighters launched an offensive against the Islamic State group in eastern Syria along the border with Iraq on Saturday, bringing them into a race with government forces marching in the same direction against the extremists in their last major holdout in the war-torn country.

If you have a phone in Tajikistan, odds are you've received a text message reminding you what not to wear. In: "national" Tajik dress, now required by law at all "traditional" gatherings. Out: the hijab, and other kinds of Muslim dress.

Egypt on Saturday announced the discovery in the southern city of Luxor of a pharaonic tomb belonging to a royal goldsmith who lived more than 3,500 years ago during the reign of the 18th dynasty.

Leaders in Qatar and Saudi Arabia spoke by telephone early Saturday in their first high-level contact since an Arab diplomatic crisis engulfed Doha three months ago, but now even terms of what they discussed have created a new dispute.

The U.S.-led coalition withdrew its aircraft monitoring a stranded 11-bus Islamic State convoy of militants and their families on Friday morning, as Syrian pro-regime forces advanced past the stopped vehicles in the country’s eastern desert, military officials said.

Only one health facility remains operational in the Islamic State-held part of Raqqa, serving thousands of civilians trapped in the Syrian city with virtually no emergency services or rescue personnel as the intense U.S.-backed campaign to liberate the city continues, Physicians for Human Rights said Friday.

An international rights group has denounced a Saudi-led military coalition for failing to investigate airstrikes in Yemen that led to the killing of civilians, saying members of the coalition are fearful of international legal liability.

Lebanon on Friday bid farewell in a state funeral to 10 of its soldiers who were captured and killed by the Islamic State group, amid a national day of mourning in honor of the servicemen.

U.S. warplanes continue to pick off militants who stray too far from the protection of the convoy’s women and children, officials said. Strikes have also destroyed militant vehicles coming to the area from ISIS-held territory.

The U.S. military broke an agreement with Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry when it released propaganda flyers deemed offensive to Muslims without first getting clearance from Afghan defense officials, a spokesman said Thursday.

At a White House news conference with Sheikh Sabah, Trump said he appreciated the emir's thus-far unsuccessful bid to end the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.

Despite calls from members of both parties, President Donald Trump will not propose an updated authorization for the use of military force measure to cover ongoing U.S. operations against groups like al-Qaida, Islamic State and others, a White House National Security Council official said.

A suicide bomber attacked a gate Wednesday at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan after the U.S. military distributed “highly offensive” propaganda flyers, Afghan and U.S. authorities said.