Drone footage from the northern Syrian city of Raqqa shows the extent of devastation caused by weeks of fighting between Kurdish-led forces and the Islamic State group and thousands of bombs dropped by the U.S.-led coalition.

As the rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas begin to reconcile, families of loved ones killed in Gaza's civil war a decade ago are also learning to get along. With the backing of an exiled former Palestinian security chief, grieving families are agreeing to drop their 10-year-old blood feuds in exchange for $50,000 payments.

Iraqi troops seized a town from Kurdish forces after a brief but intense firefight on Friday, capping a dramatic week of maneuvers that saw the Kurds hand over territory across northern Iraq.

A court in Lebanon sentenced in absentia on Friday two Lebanese citizens to death over the 1982 assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel, a move praised by his family and supporters, judicial officials said.

The Taliban have killed at least 58 Afghan security forces in a wave of attacks across the country overnight, including an assault that nearly wiped out an army camp in southern Kandahar province, officials said Thursday.

Yemeni tribal leaders say a suspected U.S. drone strike has killed three alleged al-Qaida fighters in the country's southeastern Bayda province.

Islamic State militants are capable of orchestrating and carrying out an attack against the United States, possibly downing an airplane, even after being evicted from their self-declared Syrian capital of Raqqa, the CIA director said Thursday.

A Kurdish female militia that took part in freeing the northern Syrian city of Raqqa from the Islamic State group said on Thursday it will continue the fight to liberate women from the extremists' brutal rule.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps pledged to enhance the nation's missile program in defiance of President Donald Trump, whose hardened stance against the country last week included new sanctions on the security force.

A Baghdad court issued an arrest warrant for the vice president of Iraq's autonomous northern Kurdish region on Thursday for saying that Iraqi forces had "occupied" the disputed province of Kirkuk this week.

President Donald Trump's Mideast envoy said on Thursday that if Hamas wants to play a role in any Palestinian government, it must renounce violence and commit to negotiations with Israel — demands the Islamic militant group has always rejected.

Islamic State fighters fleeing their self-declared capital in Raqqa, Syria, have left behind an unprecedented array of deadly improvised explosive devices, U.S. officials say, forecasting what's expected to be a years-long effort to purge them.

Over several nights in September, some 10,000 men, women and children fled areas under Islamic State control, hurrying through fields in northern Syria and risking fire from government troops to reach a province held by an al-Qaida-linked group.

U.S.-backed Syrian forces were removing land mines and clearing roads in the northern city of Raqqa on Wednesday, a day after commanders said they had driven the Islamic State group from its de facto capital.

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said "there's overwhelming support" in the Security Council to renew the inspectors' work for another year.

Nikki Haley urged the U.N. Security Council to consider a wide range of Iran's "destabilizing" actions in the Middle East in an early test of whether President Donald Trump's toughening position on the Islamic Republic is alienating allies and leaving the U.S. isolated internationally.

Turkey said Wednesday that Iraq's retaking of the northern city of Kirkuk from Kurdish forces earlier this week has rectified the Kurds' "mistake" in holding a non-binding referendum on independence last month.

Iran's supreme leader on Wednesday urged Europe to do more to back the 2015 nuclear deal after President Donald Trump refused to re-certify the pact.

Israel is making a diplomatic push to extend restrictions in the international nuclear deal with Iran to its development of ballistic missiles, sponsorship of terrorist acts and weapons proliferation to terrorist groups, three senior Israeli government officials said.

Saudi budget-carrier flynas on Wednesday launched the first direct flight between the kingdom and Iraq since the Gulf War 27 years ago, marking another move by the kingdom to improve ties with its neighbor in an attempt to blunt rival Iran's vast influence there.

A security firm accused of billing the Defense Department millions of dollars for guards at a U.S. air base in Iraq has agreed to pay $2.6 million in a settlement with the government, after allegations that the guards couldn’t shoot easy targets.

The imminent fall of the Islamic State's de facto capital leaves America a multitude of tasks to restore stability in the Middle East, starting with pockets of remaining IS resistance in Syria and Iraq.

Tensions between Iraq’s Kurdish forces and the nation’s government-controlled military, which resulted in brief clashes over disputed territory in northern Iraq on Monday, distract from the mission to defeat Islamic State, a U.S. military spokesman said Tuesday.

The Taliban unleashed a wave of attacks across Afghanistan on Tuesday, targeting police compounds and government facilities with suicide bombers in the country's south, east and west, and killing at least 74 people, officials said.

A timeline of events in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, captured by U.S.-backed Syrian forces from the Islamic State group on Tuesday.

Militants took over the vibrant metropolis on the Euphrates River in 2014, transforming it into the epicenter of their brutal rule, where opponents were beheaded and terror plots hatched.

Kurdish forces pulled out of disputed areas across northern and eastern Iraq on Tuesday, a day after handing the northern city of Kirkuk over to federal forces

ANALYSIS

There are concerns that the battles could be a prelude to greater violence if the two sides don't de-escalate — a situation that would force the United States to make some awkward choices about whom it should back if push really comes to shove.

U.S.-backed forces in northern Syria say they have captured Raqqa, once the seat of power for the Islamic State group, after a grueling four-month battle that left the city in ruins. Here are five things to know about Raqqa.

Israel's prime minister warned Tuesday that he will not tolerate an Iranian military presence in neighboring Syria.

The U.S. military said Monday it killed dozens of Islamic State fighters in airstrikes on two training camps in Yemen.

Kurdish forces were withdrawing from Kirkuk on Monday as Iraqi federal forces moved in to the disputed city and seized oil fields and other infrastructure amid soaring tensions over last month's Kurdish vote for independence.

Exactly a year after U.S.-backed Iraqi and Kurdish forces launched an operation to rout the Islamic State group and retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, those U.S.-trained forces were pitted against each other in northeast Iraq on Monday.

Pakistani intelligence officials say suspected U.S. missiles have struck a home in the Kurram tribal region, killing five militants.

The Israeli military said it struck and destroyed an anti-aircraft battery deep in Syria on Monday after it had opened fire on Israeli jets flying over Lebanon — a rare incident of Syrian forces targeting Israeli planes since the civil war began in 2011.

A U.S.-backed Kurdish-led force battling the Islamic State group in Syria will be in control of Raqqa "within a few days" after attacking the last militant-held pocket of the city, a spokesman for the force said Monday.

Mohamed Salem Almas, the head of criminal investigations in the Kabul police, told a press conference Sunday that the truck carried more than 3 tons of explosives.

Pakistani security officials said three bombs went off in the attack, which was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.

President Trump's decision to not re-certify the Iranian nuclear deal marks yet another key moment in relations between Iran and America. Here are some of the key moments of that relationship.

President Donald Trump's refusal to certify the Iran nuclear deal has sparked a new war of words between the Islamic Republic and America.

After landing at Toronto's airport with his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, and three young children, former hostage Joshua Boyle said the Haqqani network killed their newborn daughter and raped his wife while they were held in captivity.

President Donald Trump's decision to not re-certify the Iranian nuclear deal marks yet another key moment in relations between Iran and America, which has seen decades of mistrust and mutual recriminations.

Brittany Harris, more than 7,000 miles away, wanted the soldiers to learn what she already knew: It's a girl. So she sent them the pink-colored confetti to let them share her joy.

Five years after being taken hostage in Afghanistan, an American woman and her Canadian husband are free, along with their three children, all born in captivity. They were released in a dramatic confrontation punctuated by gunfire, officials said Thursday, though the circumstances were not entirely clear.

Civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes in the first nine months of this year rose by about 80 percent, to about 180 from some 100 in the same period last year, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a report released on Thursday.

Some 100 fighters from the Islamic State group handed themselves over to U.S.-backed fighters in the northern city of Raqqa Friday as fighting continued with remaining gunmen in a pocket inside the city.

ANALYSIS

The Pakistanis still believe they need to back Afghan militants as a hedge against their arch enemy India.

A roadside bomb that killed an American soldier in Iraq earlier this month was of a particularly lethal design not seen in six years, and its reappearance on the battlefield suggests that U.S. troops could again be facing a threat that bedeviled them at the height of the insurgency here, U.S. military officials said.

VIDEO

President Donald Trump did not pull the U.S. out of a nuclear deal with Iran nor did he re-impose nuclear sanctions on Iran, but he did toss the issue to Congress and the other nations in the accord, telling lawmakers to toughen the law.

Turkey sent special forces and commandos over the border into Syria, the start of a joint mission with Russia and Iran whose stated goal is to monitor a cease-fire agreement and pacify a stronghold for Islamic militants — but one that also has major implications for the region's Kurds.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that the United States is "sacrificing ties" by supporting its ambassador to Turkey in a diplomatic spat that resulted in the two countries suspending the issuing of travel visas to the other's citizens.

The spokesman of Iraq's state-sanctioned militias on Thursday described the Kurdish leader behind last month's vote for independence as "worse" than the Islamic State group.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Friday his country "will continue to stick to" the nuclear deal, calling it "much stronger" than U.S. President Donald Trump thinks.

While both sides want to criticize Iran on human rights, they disagree over how far to go and whether to give President Hassan Rouhani some credit.

The United Arab Emirates said Thursday it would stop issuing new visas to North Korean workers, becoming the latest Gulf country to limit Pyongyang's ability to evade sanctions and raise money abroad amid tensions with the U.S.

Britain’s most wanted female terrorist is believed to have been killed in a U.S. drone strike, according to local media.

The United States announced Thursday it is pulling out of the U.N.'s educational, scientific and cultural agency because of what Washington sees as its anti-Israel bias. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel plans to follow suit.

U.S. and Turkish officials will meet in the coming days to try to defuse a diplomatic crisis over Turkey's arrest of some U.S. citizens and local consular workers, Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said.

Rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah have reached a preliminary, partial agreement that could pave the way for President Mahmoud Abbas to resume governing the Gaza Strip a decade after Hamas overran the territory, officials said Thursday.

Mosul was more than just a city to ISIS, Col. J. Patrick Work said. It was a lynchpin of the group’s claim to be its own nation, torn from parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. He said there are clear signs that ISIS’s days are numbered.

The U.S.-led coalition battling the Islamic State group said Wednesday that it won't accept a negotiated withdrawal for hundreds of IS militants holed up in the Syrian city of Raqqa.

Several congressional Democrats who split with President Barack Obama to oppose the nuclear agreement with Iran are now urging President Donald Trump to uphold the international accord.

When Syrians began streaming into Lebanon six years ago to escape their country's war, around 1,000 of them found a welcome in the small Christian village of Miziara, in the pine-clad mountains of the north.

Iran on Wednesday warned of a tough response if President Donald Trump presses ahead with his threats to scuttle the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.

President Donald Trump says he will "very shortly" announce his decision on U.S. participation in the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, as aides prepared for an end-of-the-week rollout.

A multimillion dollar reward offered by the Trump administration in return for information leading to the arrest of two senior operatives of the Lebanese Hezbollah group is part of ongoing U.S. efforts to "demonize" the group, a Hezbollah official said Wednesday.

Iraq's federal courts have issued arrest warrants for the members of the Kurdish electoral commission that organized last month's independence referendum.

Iraqi authorities say a suicide bomber has struck a cafe in the western city of Hit, killing 11 people.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday branded a U.S. consulate staffer who was arrested by Turkish authorities a spy and said it was Turkey's rights to take steps against "an internal threat," in the latest swipe in an escalating feud with the United States.

Anadolu Agency said police launched operations Tuesday in seven provinces to catch 70 active duty officers, from the air force, navy, army, and gendarmerie, over suspected links to cleric Fethullah Gulen's movement.

The head of Iran's nuclear agency warned the United States on Tuesday against undermining the 2015 nuclear deal, saying international nonproliferation efforts as well as Washington's international standing would suffer as a result.

Two-and-a-half years of civil war have decimated Yemen's water sanitation system and its hospitals. Without access to clean water, doctors or medical supplies, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have contracted cholera, which spreads through fecal bacteria in water.

The Russian military says its warplanes have targeted Islamic State militants who have moved into Syria from Iraq, killing over 100 of them.

Iraq's Oil Ministry has ordered the restoration of an oil pipeline from the city of Kirkuk to Turkey that would bypass the country's northern Kurdish region in the wake of the area's pro-independence referendum.

A Russian combat jet crashed on Tuesday while taking off from a base in Syria, killing both crew members.

Known as Jaddalah Ismail, the tiny community had been an early bright spot in the U.S. military’s post-invasion rebuilding efforts in 2003, but word of its supposed eradication early in ISIS’ rampage through Iraq pained soldiers who’d deployed there.

Following the arrest last week of Metin Topuz, a Turkish employee of the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, the United States announced it was immediately suspending the issuance of non-immigrant visas in Turkey.

A top Emirati security official says the Qatar diplomatic crisis can end if Doha gives up hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the first time someone from the four Arab nations boycotting the country directly linked the tournament to resolving the monthslong dispute.

The Lebanese army says the United States has supplied Beirut with two A-29 Super Tucano light-attack aircraft designed for counter-insurgency operations.

U.S.-backed fighters in northern Syria are preparing for a final offensive on neighborhoods still held by the Islamic State group in the city of Raqqa, a spokesman for the group said Monday.

Iraqi Vice President Ayad Allawi warned on Monday there could be a "civil war" over the Kurdish-administered city of Kirkuk if talks over Kurdish independence are left unresolved.

The International Committee of the Red Cross announced on Monday that it will soon close two offices in Afghanistan's northern Faryab and Kunduz provinces and also reduce its activities in Balkh province following deadly attacks on its staff in the north.

Mahmood’s experience as a translator for the U.S. Army had made him a target. He had received a death threat at his family home. Three times, he traveled the dangerous road from where he lived in the Kurdistan region of Iraq to Baghdad to quietly obtain the paperwork needed for his visa.

Turkish forces on Sunday shelled areas along its border with Syria's northwestern province, an area dominated by al-Qaida-linked militants, as Turkey's president says an operation in the area to enforce a "de-escalation" zone was underway "without problems."

Members of the 244th Aviation Regiment are deploying alongside soldiers from the Louisiana Army National Guard in support of the Operation Inherent Resolve joint task force that is fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

ANALYSIS

Iraq's Kurds have sparked a major confrontation with their neighbors and Baghdad by holding a referendum for outright independence. Syria's Kurds, meanwhile, are making major advances toward their own, less ambitious goal: winning recognition for the self-rule they seized during Syria's war.

Yemen fell into chaos following its 2011 Arab Spring uprising that removed longtime autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh, now allied with Shiite rebels from the north who occupy much of the country and are fighting his successor.

The Sunday report quotes Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari as saying: "If new sanctions go into effect, the country should move its regional bases to a 2,000-kilometer radius, the range of Iranian missiles."

Bashiqa is one of a handful of towns and cities that could test the Kurdish regional government's fitness for self-rule and the Iraqi government's determination to stop the breakup of the country. How that conflict plays out will deeply affect the fate of Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities, who have been scattered, massacred and besieged by decades of war.

The United States officially gave the Afghan air force its first Black Hawk helicopters on Saturday, as the country marked 16 years since a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban from power and ignited America’s longest war.

Civilian casualties have spiraled across Syria in recent weeks as pro-government forces launch hundreds of bombing raids across areas marked for international protection.

Senators quietly deleted from a defense bill last month a strict provision tying continued U.S. funding of a costly Israeli antimissile system to completion of two flight tests.

Analysis

The International Atomic Energy Agency describes its technologically advanced transcontinental monitoring of Iran's nuclear program as one of the toughest inspections regime put in place to prevent a country from developing an atomic bomb. But some Trump administration officials and outside experts argue that the organization is not inspecting Iranian facilities aggressively enough.

The watchdog for U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan says the responsiveness of the Trump administration has made him more optimistic than ever about the future of the country’s security forces.

Syrian government forces pushed into one of the last remaining urban strongholds of the Islamic State group in the country's east on Friday, following days of fierce fighting and intense Russian airstrikes that involved cruise missiles from the Mediterranean, activists and officials said.

A long-time champion of Kurdish self-rule, Jalal Talabani also established himself as a national statesman after accepting the largely symbolic office of the presidency two years after the 2003 U.S. invasion toppled Saddam.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday challenged the detention of a U.S. citizen who was picked up on the Syrian battlefield for allegedly fighting with Islamic State militants. The Pentagon insisted it was holding the man legally.

Pakistan said Thursday its influence over the Taliban has diminished since a U.S. drone strike killed the militant group's leader last year, derailing talks aimed at bringing peace to Afghanistan.

President Donald Trump plans to announce next week that he will "decertify" the international nuclear deal with Iran, saying it is not in the national interest of the United States and kicking the issue to a reluctant Congress, people briefed on an emerging White House strategy for Iran said Thursday.

Intensified fighting in Syria in recent weeks has damaged more hospitals, with at least 10 medical facilities hit over the past 10 days and hundreds of thousands of people cut off from health care, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Thursday.