In the early hours of Wednesday, Saudi Arabia's King Salman elevated his 31-year-old son to be the kingdom's crown prince, replacing the king's 57-year-old nephew, Mohammed bin Nayef. The formal ascension of Mohammed bin Salman establishes the young royal as the most important political figure in the country, given the widespread suggestions that his father is ailing and infirm.

Turkish officials said U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has written to his Turkish counterpart, reassuring him that arms provided to Syrian Kurdish fighters would be taken back once ISIS militants are ousted from their main stronghold in Syria.

The Defense Ministry first made the claim Friday, adding that al-Baghdadi's death in the May 28 strike was still "being verified through various channels." Syromolotov similarly said that the checks were continuing.

Analysis

There was a time when the mention of the Persian Gulf brought to mind images of pampered societies ruled by aging monarchs content to preside quietly over their oil money and fantastical skyscrapers while the U.S. kept the peace.

Half a world apart, in a theocratic monarchy and a democracy, a king and a president are relying on their thirty-something son and son-in-law to help consolidate power and push their policies.

Fighters for the Islamic State group are targeting children in Mosul to prevent civilians from fleeing the city as Iraqi forces push into the last stronghold held in Iraq by the militants there, the United Nations said Thursday.

A questionable uniform choice by the Afghan military has probably cost taxpayers an unnecessary $28 million since 2008, according to a new watchdog report released Tuesday.

Lawyers for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl said Wednesday they want to ask prospective jurors in the soldier’s court-martial about their opinions on President Donald Trump to ensure their client receives a fair trial.

In a series of royal decrees carried on the state-run Saudi Press Agency, the monarch stripped Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who had been positioned to inherit the throne, from his title as crown prince and from his powerful position as the country's interior minister overseeing security.

James Moriarty, a trial lawyer in Houston, had initially been critical of Jordanian authorities. Now he says he has more faith in the kingdom's legal system after attending court this week.

With their control of Mosul slipping away, Islamic State militants decided to send a message of defiance: They blew up the 12th century al-Nuri Mosque, along with its famous leaning minaret.

A crime scene investigator told a military court Tuesday that three U.S. military trainers killed at the gate of a Jordanian air base had come under heavy fire, including from inside a nearby guard house.

Turkey bolstered its ground forces in northern Syria in a possible lead-up to renewed battles between the Turkish military and local Kurdish forces, a monitoring group and a Syrian opposition commander said Wednesday.

Australian warplanes will soon resume airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria after operations were suspended as a precaution because a U.S. fighter jet shot down a Syrian warplane earlier this week, the defense chief said Wednesday.

A French video journalist and an Iraqi colleague have been killed in a mine blast while covering the operation to root out Islamic State extremists from Mosul.

Afghan authorities on Tuesday arrested a teenager who had threatened to blow himself up at Bagram Air Field, officials said.

A U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle has shot down a second Iranian-made drone in two weeks that was threatening U.S.-led coalition forces in southern Syria, a Pentagon official said Tuesday.

Syrian government troops and their allies have steadily positioned themselves in key areas on the flanks of the U.S.-led coalition battle for the Islamic State's self-declared capital of Raqqa.

Pakistan said Tuesday that it has begun building a fence along its border with Afghanistan to improve security, a move that has angered authorities in Kabul.

Afghans who scratch out a living by removing some of the country's countless land mines have long had to contend with rugged terrain, accidental explosions and the threat of kidnapping — but these days they face the added risk of being laid off.

After nearly 16 years of war against the Taliban, the Afghan government is starting to develop a "road map" for breaking a battlefield stalemate that has been prolonged by the insurgents' ability to use Pakistan as a sanctuary.

At least eight Afghan security guards were killed when gunmen opened fire on them in the country's northern Parwan province, a provincial official said Tuesday. The Taliban later claimed the attack.

Australia has suspended its airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria as a precaution after a U.S. fighter jet shot down a Syrian warplane earlier this week.

Afghan security forces opened fire on demonstrators armed with sticks, killing one, as they cleared away a protest camp in the early hours of Tuesday that had occupied a busy avenue for the last three weeks.

The Islamic State group is in retreat across Syria and Iraq, and the contours of a new conflict among the array of parties battling it are already starting to appear.

Drug addiction in Afghanistan, once mostly limited to men, has exploded into a nationwide scourge that affects millions of people, including a growing number of women and children.

Saudi Arabia's Information Ministry said in a statement the three were onboard a boat carrying a large number of explosives headed toward the Marjan oil field, located off the kingdom's eastern shores between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

“I’m confident that we are still communicating between our operations center and the Russian Federation center,” Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the National Press Club in Washington. “I’m also confident that our forces have the capability to take care of themselves.”

ANALYSIS

The U.S. shoots down a Syrian fighter jet for the first time. Syria attacks America's allies against Islamic State militants. Iran fires missiles into Syria. Russia threatens to target U.S. coalition planes.

EU foreign ministers said in a statement Monday "that unilateral steps must be avoided, and that all open questions must be resolved through consensual positions" based on Iraq's constitution.

Jared Kushner is traveling to the Middle East this week to continue work toward a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

Four more witnesses testified before a Jordanian military court Sunday morning in the fourth hearing of a Jordanian soldier charged with murder in the shooting of three U.S. military trainers.

Syrian troops and allied militias met up with Iraqi forces at one crossing point along their shared border Sunday for the first time in years, in a step described as a major achievement by the Syrian military in their fight against the Islamic State group.

The U.S. military on Sunday shot down a Syrian Air Force fighter jet that bombed local forces aligned with the Americans in the fight against Islamic State militants, an action that appeared to mark a new escalation of the conflict.

ANALYSIS

As American military officials complete plans that are likely to send several thousand additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a flurry of setbacks in the war have underscored both the imperative of action and the pitfalls of various approaches.

Efforts to end a two-week-old crisis in the Persian Gulf shifted to the U.S., as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson canceled a trip to Mexico to try to end a Saudi-led coalition’s isolation of Qatar.

Seven U.S. servicemembers were wounded and at least one Afghan soldier was killed on Saturday in the second insider attack in Afghanistan in a week, NATO and Afghan officials said.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard said Sunday it launched missiles into eastern Syria targeting Islamic State militants in response to an attack on Iran's parliament and a shrine in Tehran, warning that it would similarly retaliate on anyone else carrying out attacks in Iran.

U.S.-backed Iraqi troops pushed into the last Islamic State stronghold in Mosul on Sunday, an Iraqi commander said, formally launching the final major battle of an eight-month campaign to drive the militants from Iraq's second largest city.

The Taliban stormed a police headquarters in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday after striking it with two suicide car bombs, killing at least five police, officials said.

The facts aren't in dispute. On Friday, a small group of assailants launched an attack near Jerusalem's Old City. Wielding guns and knives, they killed a female police officer and wounded three other people. What happened next, though, is a source of controversy.

Iran's navy has conducted a joint exercise with a Chinese fleet near the strategic Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

A U.S. airstrike has killed a senior media official belonging to the Afghan branch of the Islamic State group, the U.S. military said Friday.

Pakistan says two officials from its consulate in Afghanistan have gone missing while returning to their home country.

Analysis

Qatar is the size of Connecticut, with a population of 2.6 million, only about 300,000 of them Qatari citizens. It’s oil- and gas-rich, and its leaders have managed to defy larger Arab neighbors in recent years in part by leveraging that wealth and ties with another neighbor, Iran, and the United States — 10,000 U.S. troops are based at Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha.

ANALYSIS

A coming deployment of up to 4,000 more U.S. forces to Afghanistan, expected as part of a new Trump administration approach to America's longest war, reflects the Pentagon's view that beefing up its training-advising role and its counterterrorism effort can help turn around recent Taliban gains and snuff out a growing Islamic State threat.

The United Nations believes up to 150,000 civilians are trapped in Mosul's Old City where Islamic State extremists want to keep them as human shields — and are shooting people trying to flee, the U.N. humanitarian chief in Iraq said Friday.

Analysis

The Gaza Strip is in the midst of an electricity shortage that has left residents with just a few hours of power a day, turning many aspects of everyday life in the Hamas-ruled territory upside down and raising concerns about a humanitarian crisis.

A top Afghan security official says army security forces recaptured Tora Bora in eastern Nangarhar province.

Iraqi forces captured Saturday a border crossing point to Syria from the Islamic State group, increasing pressure on the extremists and getting closer to meeting up with Syrian troops and their allies who reached the border earlier this month for the first time in years.

The Trump Organization dissolved subsidiaries created to pursue business opportunities in Qatar six days after Donald Trump was inaugurated as America's 45th president, according to a new financial disclosure form filed on his behalf.

Palestinian militants disputed an Islamic State claim Saturday that it was behind a deadly attack against Israel, saying it was their people who killed a female police officer on duty near Jerusalem's Old City.

Last week, an Afghan soldier opened fire in eastern Afghanistan killing three U.S. troops and wounding one other, the latest in a string of insider attacks that have spanned the war, now in its 16th year.

Analysis

If Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hoped the shock of their sudden economic and diplomatic blockade of Qatar would produce a rapid capitulation, it isn’t panning out that way.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has yet to decide how many additional American troops he will send to Afghanistan to bolster the deadlocked fight with Taliban and Islamic State insurgents under his revised strategy for the nearly 16-year war, Pentagon officials said Friday.

The U.N. children's agency warned Friday that a critical funding shortfall is threatening aid to 9 million Syrian children, both in their country and among the refugees in neighboring states.

Three Palestinians armed with an automatic weapon and knives killed a young female officer on duty near Jerusalem's Old City in near simultaneous attacks at two locations Friday evening, before they were shot and killed.

Uncertainty and confusion surrounded the fate of the head of the Islamic State group Friday as Russia announced it may have killed him in an airstrike targeting a meeting of IS leaders just outside the group's self-declared capital in Syria, but U.S. officials said there was no definitive proof of his death.

At its peak, the war involved 120,000 international troops from 42 countries. So many in Afghanistan question whether adding 4,000 troops to the 8,500 U.S. soldiers in the country will bring peace. But failure could leave the U.S. vulnerable to an increasingly hostile Afghanistan and its growing anti-Western sentiment.

The Pentagon will send almost 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan, a Trump administration official said Thursday, hoping to break a stalemate in a war that has now passed to a third U.S. commander in chief.

U.S.-led coalition warplanes dropped more munitions on Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria last month than in any previous month of the nearly three-year war against the terrorist group, according to Pentagon statistics released this week.

ANALYSIS

A deal between the United States and Qatar for F-15 fighter jets and a visit to Doha by two American warships on Thursday showed the vital military links Washington maintains with a country now in a dispute with several other Arab nations.

Many commanders have reportedly fled the besieged cities of Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, in recent months for Mayadeen, a remote town in the heart of Syria's ISIS-controlled, Euphrates River valley near the Iraqi border.

In late March, students at the American University of Afghanistan returned to a new main campus — fortified by 19-foot-high concrete walls — after a devastating terrorist attack last year that left 15 dead, including seven students.

Although all sides in the war stand accused of abuses, UN officials attribute most of the heavy civilian toll to the air campaign waged by Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies.

A suicide bomber struck outside a Shiite mosque in the Afghan capital Kabul late Thursday night, killing four people, including a leader of Afghanistan's ethnic Hazaras, Hajji Ramazan Hussainzada. Another five people were wounded.

Syrian government forces are marching toward the last town held by the Islamic State group in the central province of Homs in the latest push by President Bashar Assad's troops against the extremists, state media and opposition activists said Thursday.

For Palestinians, the new mayor of Hebron is a hero who they hope will improve their city. But to Israelis, the new leader of the divided West Bank city is an unrepentant murderer.

The United Nations is warning that the cholera outbreak in Yemen is depleting aid resources to the point they won't be able to provide food to the famine-stricken country through the summer.

Qatar said Wednesday it has pulled all of its troops from the border of Djibouti and Eritrea, east African nations that have a long-running territorial dispute which Doha had helped mediate.

Islamic State drones are attacking U.S. Special Operations forces located around the group's de-facto capital of Raqqa in Syria, American officials and Syrian fighters said, sometimes disrupting the ability of American troops to call in airstrikes.

An Iranian naval patrol boat shined a laser at a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter flying over the Strait of Hormuz in what officials said was an unsafe encounter.

The Islamic State group says it has captured Tora Bora, a mountain hideout in Afghanistan once used by Osama bin Laden, but the Taliban on Thursday dismissed the claim, saying they were still in control of the cave complex.

Afghan government officials say they are leery about President Donald Trump’s plan to grant new authority to the Pentagon to set troop levels in the war-torn country, expressing concern that such a shift could be a sign that larger numbers of Americans might soon be headed back to the front lines in the 15-year war.

Jawaher has lived in this tiny nation her whole life. But a political showdown threatens to unravel her world, potentially forcing her to move to a country she hardly knows and splitting her family apart.

A Jordanian soldier has pleaded "not guilty" to murder charges in the killing of three U.S. military trainers.

The U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria is endangering civilians by using artillery-delivered white phosphorus, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday, after reports that such weapons were used in the Syrian city of Raqqa.

President Donald Trump has given the Pentagon new authorities to decide the troop levels in Afghanistan, a U.S. official said Tuesday. The move could lead to a deployment of thousands more troops as commanders decide the way forward in the now 15-year-old war.

More than 100 Islamic State militants launched a counterattack in Mosul on Wednesday, killing 11 Federal Police and four civilians in clashes that were still underway, Iraqi security officials said.

The United Nations said it will not be "engaged in any way or form" in the process surrounding the independence referendum in Iraq's northern semi-autonomous Kurdish region planned for September.

A suicide bomber targeted a checkpoint run by rival insurgents in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province Wednesday, killing nine of them, an Afghan official said.

The U.S. has deployed a truck-mounted missile system into Syria, an official said Wednesday, to a forward operating group of rebels and U.S. military advisers that have repeatedly clashed with government forces.

Airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition have caused a "staggering" loss of civilian life in recent months around the Islamic State's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa, a United Nations investigative body said Wednesday.

A Saudi-led coalition says rebels in Yemen have fired a missile at an Emirati ship, causing no damage but wounding one sailor.

A U.N. investigative commission for Syria said on Wednesday that last month's "de-escalation" agreement has reduced violence in only one of the four zones included in the deal and has not led to greater humanitarian access to besieged areas across the war-torn country.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said Tuesday that the White House would deliver its revised strategy for Afghanistan by mid-July, amid growing frustrations on Capitol Hill that the country’s security is worsening with no plan of action in sight.

Workers for government contractor DynCorp International conspired to bilk the State Department out of millions of dollars, according to a federal investigation in Virginia.

The United States should consider moving its air base out of Qatar, the Emirati ambassador to the U.S. said Tuesday, encouraging the Trump administration to use its leverage to further pressure Qatar over alleged support for extremism.

The U.S. military has more than doubled the size of the team that investigates reports of civilian casualties in strikes by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria.

Food poisoning at a camp for displaced residents of Mosul killed at least two people and sickened more than 700, Iraq's health minister said Tuesday. At least 300 people remain in serious condition.

Pakistani intelligence officials say a suspected U.S. missile strike has killed a militant commander and his aide in the country's northwest. The officials say the missiles were fired from a U.S. drone which had been seen hovering in the area.

The Senate on Tuesday narrowly turned back a bipartisan bid to rebuke Saudi Arabia and reject President Donald Trump's plan to sell the kingdom more than $500 million in precision-guided munitions, sparing the new Republican administration an embarrassing defeat.

The three American soldiers killed by an Afghan soldier in an apparent insider attack Saturday in eastern Afghanistan belonged to the Fort Campbell, Kentucky-based 101st Airborne Division, the Pentagon announced Monday.

The siege of Mosul and targeted killings of chemical weapons experts in U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have significantly degraded the Islamic State's production capability, although the group likely retains expertise to produce small batches of sulfur mustard and chlorine agents, a London-based analysis group said Tuesday.

American troops opened fire after a roadside bomb hit their convoy in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province on Monday, killing three civilians, a spokesman for the provincial government claimed.

The Islamic State group is calling on supporters to carry out attacks in the United States and Europe during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan that began two weeks ago.

Syrian activists say an airstrike in the contested de-facto capital of the Islamic State group has killed at least 7 civilians.

Its strongholds in Iraq and Syria slipping from its grasp, the Islamic State group threatened to make this year's Ramadan a bloody one at home and abroad. With attacks in Egypt, Britain and Iran among others and a land-grab in the Philippines, the group is trying to divert attention from its losses and win over supporters around the world in the twisted competition for jihadi recruits during the Muslim holy month.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have pushed toward a medical complex in western Mosul, trying to dislodge Islamic State militants from two neighborhoods they still partly hold outside the Old City.

A Jordanian military court says it will appoint a lawyer for a Jordanian soldier charged with murder in the shooting deaths of three U.S. military trainers.