After helping government forces break Islamic State's grip over a strategic town just south of Baghdad on Saturday, Shi'ite militias decided it was time for payback.
A Saudi court has sentenced 17 people, four of them women, to prison terms of up to 30 years in two separate cases, one of which involving an al Qaeda plot to attack U.S. soldiers in Qatar and Kuwait, the state news agency SPA said.
Prominent Bahraini rights activist Nabeel Rajab went on trial on Sunday over remarks published on his Twitter account that were critical of state institutions, his lawyer said, in a case that has drawn criticism from international civil society groups.
The Lebanese government has cut back sharply on the number of Syrian refugees it is allowing into the country, the United Nations representative in Lebanon said on Saturday.
Yemen's new Shi'ite Muslim powerbrokers sent fighters towards an al Qaeda stronghold on Wednesday, raising the possibility of clashes between the politically ascendant Houthi movement and the hardline Sunni Muslims of the militant network.
Yemen's president named the country's U.N. envoy as prime minister on Monday in a move welcomed by the Shi'ite Muslim Houthi group which controls the capital, signaling an easing in the country's prolonged political crisis.
Four opposition groups including the largest, Al Wefaq, will boycott a parliamentary election scheduled for November in Bahrain to protest what they described as a vote where the results would be "fully controlled by the ruling authority".
Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim militant group, has seized a third of Syria and large areas of Iraq and this year proclaimed a caliphate across the two countries in the heart of the Middle East.
Iran is to give a military grant to the Lebanese Army, the head of Iran's national security council said on Tuesday, boosting security forces that are already backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Hundreds of Yemenis demonstrated in Sanaa on Sunday demanding that Houthi rebels who had seized control of the capital last week leave, a day after the Shi'ite Muslim fighters attacked the home of the intelligence chief.
Yemen's Shi'ite Muslim rebels signed an agreement with other political parties on Sunday to form a more inclusive government after rebels advanced on major state institutions in the capital Sanaa, largely unopposed by troops and security forces.
World powers backed military measures on Monday to help defeat Islamic State fighters in Iraq, boosting Washington's efforts to set up a coalition, but made no mention of the tougher diplomatic challenge next door in Syria.
Iraq's parliament approved a new government headed by Haider al-Abadi as prime minister on Monday night, in a bid to rescue Iraq from collapse, with sectarianism and Arab-Kurdish tensions on the rise.
