Leaders of Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Benin on Tuesday announced plans to step up the fight against Boko Haram with an additional battalion and a command center to tackle the militants whose insurgency has spread beyond Nigeria, a statement said.
Taking aim at Islamic State, Saudi Arabia has mounted a battle for hearts and minds at this year's haj, warning pilgrims that the hardline group is "evil" and seeking to recruit their children to fight in Iraq and Syria.
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.
When Islamic State fighters tried to storm the Tigris River town of Dhuluiya north of Baghdad this week, they were repelled by a rare coalition of Sunni tribal fighters inside the town and Shi'ites in its sister city Balad on the opposite bank.
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.
U.S. intelligence agencies underestimated Islamic State activity inside Syria, which has become "ground zero" for jihadists worldwide, President Barack Obama said in a CBS television interview broadcast on Sunday.
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.
American-led and Arab-backed air strikes carrying the fight against Islamic State from Iraq into Syria have dragged Washington into a new Middle East war - exactly the kind of conflict Barack Obama spent his presidency trying to avoid.
It is more than 23 years since Arab countries last made common cause to join U.S.-led military action, and it has taken the threat of Islamic State to persuade them that any public backlash in an already turbulent region is a price worth paying.
For decades the opposing poles of Middle East power politics, Saudi Arabia and Iran may be driven to set aside at least some of their differences by the rise of a mutual enemy: Islamic State.
President Barack Obama told leaders of Congress on Tuesday that he did not need for them to authorize his strategy to fight Islamic State, ahead of a speech to Americans that may herald expanded operations against the group in Iraq and perhaps 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.
No one disputes the horrific outcome: Iraqi military recruits were led off their base unarmed and murdered in their hundreds, machine gunned in mass graves by the Islamic State, whose fighters boasted proudly of the killings on the Internet.
