As part of the crackdown, about 160 journalists are currently in jail, mostly on terrorism-related charges, while more than 150 media outlets, from broadcasters to newspapers and magazines, have been shut down.

Britain has joined the U.S. in calling for an end to the boycott of Qatar after the country’s pledge to fight terrorism.

The abducted workers, mostly from northern India, had been employed by an Iraqi construction company. Thousands of Indians worked and lived in Iraq.

A teenage German girl who ran away after converting to Islam and was found by Iraqi troops in Mosul says she wants to go home, a German newspaper and broadcaster reported Monday.

On the day the Islamic State overran the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014, it laid claim to one of the greatest weapons bonanzas ever to fall to a terrorist group. But the most fearsome weapon in Mosul on that day was never used by the terrorists. Only now is it becoming clear what happened to it.

Two Jordanians were killed and an Israeli was wounded by gunfire Sunday in a residential building in the heavily fortified Israeli embassy compound in Jordan's capital, the kingdom's Public Security Directorate said.

The Taliban seized control of two districts in different areas of Afghanistan in a matter of hours, officials said Sunday — the latest advances by the militants, who have vowed to step up attacks as the year progresses.

East Jerusalem continued to smolder Saturday after one of the worst days of Israeli-Palestinian unrest in years.

Israel's military fortified its troops in the West Bank and placed forces on high alert Saturday, a day after a Palestinian stabbed to death three members of an Israeli family and some of the worst Israeli-Palestinian clashes in years erupted over tensions at the Holy Land's most contested shrine.

Sources say some of those arrested were from Chechnya, and the women were from Russia, Iran, Syria, France, Belgium and Germany.

A German girl who ran away from home shortly after converting to Islam has been found as Iraqi forces liberated the northern city of Mosul from Islamic States forces, German and Iraqi officials said Saturday as authorities tried to figure out what to do with her.

A historic church thought to have been blown up by the Islamic State has been found intact following the liberation of Mosul’s Old City.

The report said the missile dubbed Sayyad-3 is an upgrade to previous versions of the missile. Sayyad means "hunter" in Farsi.

The zone is one of four proposed in a plan approved in May by Russia and Iran, which support Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Turkey, which backs rebels fighting his forces

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has inaugurated a military base in the country's northwest to protect facilities and projects in coastal cities.

Qatar's ruling emir said on Friday that his embattled Gulf nation remains open to dialogue with four Arab countries that have isolated it, but that any resolution to the crisis must respect his country's sovereignty.

A steady stream of civilians crossed a floating bridge over the Tigris River into west Mosul Thursday as Iraqi troops searched for the remnants of defeated Islamic State forces in the city.

The surprise attack came before dawn. An Islamic State group militant emerged from underground right into a deserted building being used as a position by U.S.-backed Syrian forces on a front line in Raqqa. He screamed, Allahu akbar, or "God is great," and threw a bomb, killing a guard.

Friday’s strike on a security forces compound in Gereshk district was part of a U.S.-supported operation against Taliban militants in the area.

The Trump administration is still sorting out "the big ideas" for a new Afghanistan strategy, beyond troop levels and other military details, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Friday.

Qatar's ruler will address his nation on Friday evening in his first public speech since the crisis with a Saudi-led alliance erupted last month.

An al-Qaida suspect linked to a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist has been brought to Philadelphia from Spain to face terrorism charges in federal court, despite President Donald Trump's promises to send terror suspects to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The battle Friday occurred after Taliban insurgents stormed a compound of the Afghan National Security Force in Pusht Rod district.

Saudi Arabia's king has stripped the Interior Ministry of many of its key mandates, including counter-terrorism, and transferred those powers to a newly created body overseen by the monarch, the state agency reported Friday.

The Syrian army and members of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group launched a major ground offensive on Friday aimed at ending the yearslong presence of hundreds of militants in a border area between the two countries.

The covert CIA weapons and training program for opposition fighters began under President Barack Obama. It fizzled out amid battlefield losses and concerns about extremism within rebel ranks.

About 2,100 soldiers from Fort Polk in Louisiana will deploy to Iraq later this year to take over the mission to train and advise Iraqi security forces fighting Islamic State militants following the fall of Mosul, the Army announced Thursday.

President Donald Trump indicated Thursday that White House and Pentagon officials have yet to complete their review of the military strategy to break the stalemate in the nearly 16-year-old war in Afghanistan.

The spokesman for Turkeys' president says the government had no role in the publication by the Turkish state-run news agency of a map showing U.S. military posts in Syria.

Tom Bossert, President Donald Trump's homeland and counterterrorism adviser, said there needs to be a political outcome in Syria, not a military-imposed one that has no political strategy to fill a void in leadership.

When Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates led the imposition of a political and economic blockade on Qatar last month, there were immediate, far-reaching consequences: Flights were canceled and rerouted, Qatari citizens were expelled from other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, shipping routes were closed and airspace was suddenly off-limits to Qatar's pilots. But the blockade may have the biggest effect on Qatar's largest - and most overlooked - population: foreign migrant workers, who make up about 90 percent of the country's population.

A State Department report released Wednesday underscores the persistence of the terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State, but counterterrorism officials say the sophistication of the group's operations is slipping.

Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces near a contested Jerusalem shrine after Muslim worshippers massed outside for evening prayers on Thursday as tensions over the holy site escalated further.

Pakistan's military says troops have raided several militant hideouts in a northwestern tribal region near the Afghan border, triggering firefights that killed one soldier.

The eight additions to the U.N. sanctions blacklist include IS leaders in Southeast Asia, IS-affiliated extremist groups in Syria, foreign fighters from the Caucuses and an illicit money exchange business.

Syrian opposition activists say insurgents have ambushed a Syrian military force near the capital, Damascus, killing more than two dozen of them.

The Pentagon has nominated Vice Adm. John Aquilino to lead the Navy’s 5th Fleet, as naval forces in the region continue airstrikes against the Islamic State and face increased tensions with Iran.

The head of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard warned the U.S. that it better move its forces away from his country if Washington imposes new sanctions on his paramilitary group.

Turkey's state-run news agency published U.S. base locations in northern Syria, a move that threatens to deepen distrust between the two allies by exposing American soldiers on the front lines of the fight against Islamic State.

President Donald Trump has decided to end the CIA's covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.

Saudi Arabia announced Wednesday that a woman who was detained after wearing a miniskirt in a video that went viral has been released without charge.

The team that drew the most attention at the FIRST Global Challenge, which ended Tuesday, was a squad of girls from Afghanistan who were twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened.

A French woman captured in Mosul with her children is facing possible prosecution in Iraq for allegedly collaborating with ISIS, in a test case for how governments handle the families of foreign fighters now that the extremists are in retreat.

If Washington, under any pretext, imposes new sanctions against Iran, "we will stand up to the United States," Iran's president Hassan Rouhani said, adding that the "great nation of Iran will have an appropriate answer" and that the Iranian parliament will also act.

The Israeli military on Wednesday promoted a comprehensive aid program to Syrian civilians harmed by their country's civil war, marking a significant broadening of its involvement in a conflict of which it has tried to steer clear.

Iran continues to be the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, the Trump administration said Wednesday in a new report that also noted a decline in the number of terrorist attacks globally between 2015 and 2016.

Four Arab nations that cut ties with Qatar urged the tiny Gulf nation Tuesday to commit to six principles on combatting extremism and terrorism and negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement them — a step that could pave the way for an early resolution of the crisis.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was caught Wednesday by a live microphone railing against the European Union's "crazy" insistence on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a precondition for closer ties.

Rights groups have accused the Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen's Shiite rebels of bombing civilian gatherings, markets, hospitals, and residential areas across Yemen.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 11 people, among them 3 civilians, have been killed on both sides.

Afghanistan has the highest number in the world of victims of land mines, which along with roadside bombs kill or wound an estimated 140 people every month.

Russia's mostly Muslim republic of Chechnya is becoming a major player in rebuilding war-ravaged Syria. And ordinary Chechens are likely to foot the bill, with many of them being forced to make contributions or face the possibility of exile or death, human rights activists say.

Hundreds of suspected Islamic State members swept up by Iraqi forces in Mosul are being held in a cramped and stifling prison just outside the city.

About a month after Henriette Karra's death, Israeli police charged her father with murder, Israeli media outlets reported. Authorities allege he killed her over his "vehement opposition" to her relationship with the young Muslim man and her intentions to convert to Islam for him, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The Department of Homeland Security has now lifted the ban, which required passengers to check any gadgets larger than a mobile phone as a safety precaution, on nine of the 10 Middle Eastern and African airports affected.

A Turkish court on Tuesday jailed Amnesty International's Turkey director and five other human rights activists pending trial for allegedly aiding an armed terror group.

Lebanon is preparing a military operation to secure a lawless section of the border with Syria, Prime Minister Saad Hariri told parliament on Tuesday.

A dispute over metal detectors is escalating into a new showdown between Israel and the Muslim world over a Jerusalem shrine that has triggered major Israeli-Palestinian confrontations in the past.

Hundreds of people in southern Jordan have protested the conviction of a local soldier in the shooting deaths of three U.S. military trainers.

A Syrian Kurdish militia said Tuesday it will hand over the bodies of nine enemy fighters to Turkey following clashes with Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces.

The Trump administration certified to Congress late Monday that Iran has continued to meet the required conditions of its nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers.

Desperate to help Syrians stuck on Jordan's sealed border, U.N. agencies agreed late last year to an aid system that critics say handed much of the control over aid distribution to Jordan's military and a Jordanian contractor, and also involved armed men on the Syrian side.

The Trump administration slapped 18 Iranian individuals and groups with sanctions Tuesday for aiding the country's non-nuclear weapons programs, in a bid to show the president is staying tough on Iran.

The U.S. air war in Afghanistan has returned to a level of intensity not seen since American forces were still fanned out across the country and fighting Taliban militants in daily skirmishes in 2012, according to recently released military data.

Afghan security forces backed by U.S. air power and Marine Corps advisers retook a key district from the Taliban in Afghanistan's restive Helmand province on Monday after a battle to push the insurgents away from the province’s capital, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

A Jordanian soldier was sentenced Monday to life in prison after being convicted of killing three U.S. military trainers last year, but some said questions lingered about his motive for the shooting at a Jordanian air base.

U.S.-backed Syrian fighters fought Islamic State militants in the heart of Raqqa, the extremists' self-styled capital, on Monday, as scores of civilians fled areas controlled by the group.

The war in Afghanistan has claimed a record number of civilian lives in the first half of the year partly because of an increase in suicide attacks, the United Nations said Monday.

Now an all-but-stateless Islamic State — largely driven from Mosul, and besieged in its self-declared capital, Raqqa — might seem poised for oblivion. But longtime observers warn that the group’s virulent ideology is still very much alive, along with its ability to threaten both the immediate region and the wider world.

Iranian state TV is reporting that a soldier has opened fire on his comrades, killing three and injuring six others.

An American scholar jailed in Iran for espionage is "linguistically gifted" and had "unbounded intellectual curiosity" in pursuing his doctorate at Princeton University, his adviser said Monday.

When Syria's uprising broke out, Rania Kisar left her job in the United States and returned home to join what she dreamed would be the ouster of President Bashar Assad and the building of a new Syria. Her main focus these days has been to keep Islamic militants from taking over the dream.

The U.N. envoy for Iraq is warning that the road ahead is "extremely challenging" following the liberation of Mosul, stressing that freeing other territory controlled by Islamic State extremists won't be easy.

The heavily armed fighters peered out of a broken second-story window at their outpost in a crumbling house on the western edge of this shell-shocked city, where the Islamic State is fighting a furious battle to hold on to the capital of its self-declared caliphate.

ANALYSIS

The battle of Mosul is over, but the war against the Islamic State is far from done. The militants have lost some 60 percent of the territory they controlled at the peak of their expansion, but that leaves a sizable area, mostly in Syria but also Iraq, to be recaptured.

The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

A military court is set rule Monday in the murder trial of a Jordanian soldier accused of gunning down three U.S. military trainers in a shooting spree at a Jordanian air base.

Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, an army spokesman, says an infantry division backed by air force and artillery will clear the Rajgal Valley in the Khyber tribal region.

He was only 12 when he first stole into Israel from his home in a Palestinian farming village in the West Bank to find work. A few weeks later, he returned with more than $2,000 in wages.

Iran has imprisoned a Chinese-American man for ten years after accusing him of "infiltrating" the country and detained President Hassan Rouhani's brother over allegations of financial misconduct, authorities said Sunday.

The attack in Damascus came hours after a bomb exploded near a hospital in the rebel-held northwestern city of Idlib wounding five people.

In the past two years, Palestinians have killed 45 Israelis, two visiting Americans and a British tourist in stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks. During that period, Israeli forces have killed more than 255 Palestinians.

Army Maj. Gen. Robin Fontes on Saturday assumed the highest position of any female servicemember in Afghanistan since the war began, taking over command of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan.

Germany on Saturday confirmed that two German tourists were killed in a knife attack at a hotel in the popular Egyptian Red Sea resort of Hurghada. The assailant, Egypt said, was a 28-year-old university graduate from the Nile Delta.

Waving large red Turkish flags, tens of thousands joined a national unity march in Istanbul on Saturday, converging at the iconic July 15 Martyrs' Bridge to mark the anniversary of the failed military coup attempt that 250 people died resisting.

Last year, Afghanistan's version of "Sesame Street" introduced a little girl character aimed at inspiring girls in the deeply conservative Muslim nation. Now a new muppet is joining the cast: her brother, who will show boys the importance of respecting women.

France's foreign minister on Saturday called on Qatar's neighbors to immediately lift measures impacting thousands of people in the Gulf, becoming the latest foreign diplomat to visit the region and attempt to find a resolution to a crisis that has dragged on for more than a month.

Twice rejected for U.S. visas, an all-girls robotics team from Afghanistan arrived in Washington early Saturday after an extraordinary, last-minute intervention by President Donald Trump.

Abu Sayed is the third leader of ISIS in Afghanistan and neighboring parts of Pakistan to be killed in the past year.

Two German female tourists were stabbed to death while four other foreigners were wounded in an attack Friday at a hotel in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Hurghada, an Egyptian security official said.

Iraq's U.S.-backed forces wrested Mosul from the Islamic State group at the cost of enormous destruction. The nearly 9-month fight culminated with a crescendo of devastation — the blasting of the historic Old City to root out the deeply dug-in militants.

Staffan de Mistura, the special U.N. envoy for Syria, said the Syrian government has not budged in its unwillingness to discuss political transition at the talks in Geneva while President Bashar Assad's representatives have pursued an almost incessant theme of the fight against terrorism.

Arab assailants struck at ground zero of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Friday, opening fire from inside a major Jerusalem shrine and killing two Israeli policemen before being shot dead.

Saudi Arabia's official news agency says attackers have killed a border guard soldier and wounded another in Qatif, an eastern province heavily populated by the kingdom's minority Shiites.

Human Rights Watch on Thursday condemned videos circulating on social media purportedly showing Iraqi forces killing and beating men suspected of being Islamic State group fighters in Mosul.

The 1st Armored Division on Wednesday assumed command of the multinational land component of the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition from the 1st Infantry Division, which had led it since November.

After nine months of vicious street-to-street fighting to drive the Islamic State out of Mosul, it could take many years more to fully remove explosives and other munitions from what was once one of Iraq's most populous cities, U.S. State Department officials said.

Iraqi security forces have forcibly moved dozens of women and children with alleged links to Islamic State to a tent camp near Mosul that authorities describe as a "rehabilitation camp" for ISIS suspects' families, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.

The Trump administration, delaying an anticipated confrontation with Iran until the completion of a long-awaited policy review, plans to recertify Tehran's compliance with the Obama-era nuclear deal, according to U.S. and foreign officials.

They left their homes to escape the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and now they are going back. Worn out from months of living in tents, about 150 Syrian families decided this week to return to the city of Homs.