Thousands of supporters of Iraq's powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr stepped up their pressure tactics Friday with a weekly prayer session in the high-security Green Zone they have occupied for three weeks.
Tensions in the impoverished, war-scarred country have escalated over the inability of political factions to agree on formation of a government, 10 months after parliamentary elections.
At least 21 civilians including children were killed Friday in separate bombardments in the latest flare-up of violence along Syria's northern border with Turkey, Kurdish authorities and a war monitor said.
The bloodshed comes against a backdrop of increased tensions pitting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against Turkish troops and their Syrian proxies.
Wildfires which killed at least 38 people across northern Algeria have been largely contained, firefighters said Friday, but new blazes forced further evacuations and the closure of some roads near the Tunisian border.
Fierce fires have become an annual fixture in Algeria's parched forests where climate change is exacerbating a long-running drought.
"We are currently fighting 11 fires," the civil defence's Colonel Boualem Boughlef told an evening news broadcast.
He said more than 1,000 families had been evacuated since Wednesday.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday that Turkey was not looking to seize any Syrian territory despite stepping up its attacks against Kurdish forces in the war-torn country's north.
Erdogan's comments came days after a Turkish air strikes on a Syrian border post run by regime forces reportedly killed 17 fighters.
A war monitor said that both Kurds who man some of the Syrian border posts and regime forces were killed in the Turkish raids.
The official Syrian news agency said three government soldiers died.
A member of the notorious Islamic State kidnap-and-murder cell known as the "Beatles," is to be sentenced in a US court on Friday for the deaths of four American hostages in Syria.
El Shafee Elsheikh, 34, faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison after being convicted in Alexandria, Virginia, in April of hostage-taking, conspiracy to murder US citizens and supporting a terrorist organization.
A Saudi woman given 34 years in prison for tweets critical of the government knew people were informing on her but did not take it seriously, a friend said Thursday.
Salma al-Shehab, a member of the Shiite minority in the Sunni-ruled kingdom, had been studying for a doctorate in Britain and was arrested in January 2021 while on holiday.
On August 9 she was sentenced to 34 years in jail for aiding dissidents seeking to "disrupt public order" in the kingdom by relaying their tweets.
Ukrainian heavyweight Oleksandr Usyk has drawn on his Cossack heritage as he prepares for his world title clash with towering Briton Anthony Joshua, whose career could face a reckoning on the Red Sea.
Usyk, roared on by millions of war-wracked Ukrainians, is the bookies' favourite for Saturday's clash in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, after he dismantled Joshua to snatch his belts in London last year.
In the capital of crisis-torn Iraq, two tent cities have sprung up as rival Shiite blocs have set up protest camps, complete with cooked meals and air-conditioners against the blistering heat.
As the war-scarred country's political impasse has dragged on ever since inconclusive October elections, both sides are digging in for the long haul in and near Baghdad's high-security Green Zone.
Israeli security forces on Thursday raided the offices of multiple Palestinian human rights groups in the occupied West Bank, which the state has branded "terrorist organisations".
The military said soldiers and police officers "closed seven institutions and confiscated property" in the overnight raids.
At the Ramallah offices of human rights group Al Haq, the front door had been welded shut and a Hebrew statement left saying it would remain closed for "security reasons".
Algerian firefighters on Thursday brought under control a string of forest blazes that have killed at least 38 people including 12 who died in a bus trapped by the flames.
Deadly fires have become an annual scourge in Algeria, where climate change has turned large areas of forest into a tinderbox in the blistering summer months.
Authorities have been accused of being ill-prepared, with few firefighting aircraft available despite record casualties in last year's blazes and a cash windfall from gas exports amid soaring global energy prices.
