Grief etched into her face, 15-year-old Ibrar struggled to find the words to describe her pain at the loss of three friends in the huge flood that shattered her Libyan hometown.

"We will never forget that day in Derna," she said, while trying hard to remember how her father managed to save her along with her mother and five siblings.

In her hospital bed, she recounted the horrors of the disaster that killed thousands of people. "The number is huge," she said. "There were corpses on the ground. The cars were piled on top of the bodies."

Communications were severed Tuesday to the flood-hit Libyan city of Derna and journalists were asked to leave, a day after hundreds protested against authorities they blamed for the thousands of deaths.

A tsunami-sized flash flood broke through two ageing river dams upstream from the city on the night of September 10 and razed entire neighbourhoods, sweeping untold thousands into the Mediterranean Sea.

Iraq's President Abdel Latif Rashid condemned on Tuesday "repeated Turkish attacks", a day after a drone strike on a northern airfield killed three Kurdish counterterrorism officers.

"The Turkish ambassador will be called in to receive a letter of protest addressed to the Turkish president", Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rashid's office said in a statement.

"Mercy be on the martyrs of Iraq, the civilian and military heroes killed by repeated Turkish attacks."

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will visit China from Thursday, his office said, his first trip to the allied country since before the Syrian civil war broke out more than 12 years ago.

China will be the third non-Arab country Assad visits during the conflict, which has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country's infrastructure and industry.

"In response to an official invitation" from Chinese President Xi Jinping, Assad and his wife "will visit China starting Thursday", the presidency said in a statement.

In the earthquake-hit mountains of Morocco, 13-year-old Abdessamad El Berd gets up before dawn to make the long trek to the tent city that is his new school, walking by torchlight and careful to avoid roaming dogs.

His father accompanies him on the 14-kilometre (nine-mile) walk from their remote village of Tinghar to the makeshift school set up in the small town of Asni, in the disaster-hit area south of Marrakech.

"I don't want him to drop out of school, but it's tough," said the 45-year-old father, Brahim El Berd.

Five Americans freed by Iran in a high-stakes prisoner swap landed back in the United States on Tuesday to a joyous reunion with family members.

The five arrived aboard an executive jet at a military airfield in Fort Belvoir southwest of Washington.

Relatives waved US flags and hugged the freed prisoners as they disembarked from the aircraft, then posed for a group photograph, grinning widely.

"Welcome home," National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Flash floods have injured 20 people in northern Iran, after what officials described as the region's heaviest rains in a century, Iranian media reported.

The rains have battered the cities of Astara and Talesh, on the Caspian Sea coast near the border with Azerbaijan since Sunday, the reports said.

"Heavy rains ... have fallen over Astara which have not been seen in 100 years," Gilan province's head of crisis management Amir Moradi told the ISNA news agency on Monday.

Twenty people have been injured, the Mehr news agency reported.

In a Libyan hospital ward, trauma and grief mix with disbelief and anger among the survivors of the flood disaster that killed untold thousands in the devastated city of Derna.

A tsunami-sized flash flood crashed through the Mediterranean city, razing entire neighbourhoods, after two upstream dams burst amid torrential rains on September 10.

"Two years ago, the big dam already had leaks, even though it was only half full," Abdelqader al-Omrani, 48, told AFP from his hospital bed in Benghazi, the major city in the eastern part of Libya.

Three members of Iraqi Kurdistan's anti-terrorism forces were killed Monday in a drone strike that hit an airfield near Sulaimaniyah, the autonomous northern region's anti-terrorism services said in a statement.

"Unfortunately the bombing killed three of our Peshmerga comrades from the anti-terrorist services" and wounded three others, the statement said, without identifying those behind the attack.

The drone strike targeted anti-terror forces at the Arbat airfield, southeast of Sulaimaniyah, which is mainly used by crop-spraying aircraft.

The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Monday urged Iran to reconsider its decision to deny access to top UN inspectors, telling AFP that failure to cooperate will carry severe consequences.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday that Iran had withdrawn accreditation from several inspectors, a move Teheran described as retaliation for "political abuses" by the United States, France, Germany and Britain.

"We have to ask them to review this decision," IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said in an interview with AFP.