Afghan security forces “repelled” a coordinated Taliban assault on the northern city of Kunduz yesterday, President Ashraf Ghani said,

Syria and its ally Russia have stepped up an offensive against the last big stronghold of Syrian rebels, mounting more air raids and deploying ground reinforcements including Iranian-backed militias, army defectors and residents said yesterday.

Clashes between anti-government fighters and regime forces killed 51 combattants on both sides in northwestern Syria yesterday, a war

Iran will not talk to the United States until all sanctions imposed on Tehran are lifted, President Hassan Rouhani said yesterday, a day after President Donald Trump said he would meet his Iranian counterpart to try to end a nuclear standoff.

Israeli drone strikes hit a military position belonging to an Iranian-backed Palestinian faction in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley near the Syrian

Israel yesterday said an air strike against an arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Syria that it accused of planning “killer drone

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri said two Israeli drones which crashed in a suburb of Beirut dominated by the Iranian-backed

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif flew into Biarritz in southern France for the G7 summit yesterday in an unexpected and

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said yesterday that Turkish troops will not quit a military observation post in northwestern Syria where they are surrounded by government forces.

Israeli forces bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight in retaliation for Palestinian rocket attacks, the military said yesterday.

Damascus yesterday said it is opening a corridor for civilians to leave the rebel-held northwestern region of Idlib, where government bombardment has killed hundreds since late April, state media said.

Iran is prepared to work on French proposals to salvage the international nuclear deal that Tehran signed with world powers in 2015 but it will not tolerate US interference in the Gulf, its foreign minister said yesterday.

The death toll from an Islamic State attack on a Kabul wedding at the weekend has reached at least 80, an official said yesterday, as the Afghan capital still reels from the deadliest blast in more than a year. A suicide bomber targeted a packed Afghan wedding hall in west

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday began implementing a landmark reform allowing women over the age of 21 to receive passports and travel abroad without permission from a male “guardian”, authorities said. The reform, announced earlier this month, weakens the restrictive

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is expected to visit Paris and meet with his counterpart and the French President

China’s Syria envoy yesterday said that “terrorist organisations” including the Islamic State group are being revived in the war-ravaged country, urging the international community not to ignore the “early warning” signs.

A Bangladeshi man has been killed in a road accident in Riyadh of Saudi Arabia.

An Iranian tanker sailed through the Mediterranean towards Greece yesterday after it was released from detention off Gibraltar, and Tehran said that any at US move to seize the vessel again would have “heavy consequences”.

The Libyan navy yesterday said 335 migrants had been rescued and one body recovered in separate operations off the coast, as they

Israel said it opened fire on armed Palestinians on Gaza’s border overnight and Hamas’s health ministry reported three dead yesterday, the latest in a series of incidents along the tense barrier.