Lebanon’s president yesterday asked Sunni leader Saad al-Hariri to form a new government after he won the support of a majority of MPs and the endorsement of the influential parliament speaker.

Syrian rebels renewed their bid to break a government siege on eastern Aleppo on Thursday, shelling regime-held parts of the city, hours before a brief Russian-declared ceasefire was due to begin.

Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi urged his fighters in an audio recording posted online on Thursday not to retreat from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, but also to invade Turkey and attack Saudi Arabia.

Syrian rebels yesterday rejected Russian demands that they withdraw from Aleppo by tomorrow evening, an official in one insurgent faction said.

A year after militants bombed a Russian plane carrying holidaymakers in Egypt, tourism shows little sign of recovery in the Arab country grappling with an economic crisis.

South Sudan said yesterday it had detained at least 17 people, most of them soldiers, suspected of committing rape and other crimes in July during an attack on Hotel Terrain in the capital Juba.

More than 1mn civilians in Mosul are in grave danger and aid workers are “bracing for the worst”, a relief group said yesterday, after Iraqi forces reached the militant-held city.

A picture taken on Monday in Cairo shows yellow-brown water in a section of the Nile River caused by excess silt from recent floods in the southern Egyptian provinces.

Morocco’s Islamist Prime Minister said in an interview with DPA yesterday he understands why thousands have protested at the gruesome death of a fish merchant crushed in a garbage truck as he tried to prevent officials destroying his goods.

A prince of Saudi Arabia's ruling Al Saud family was given lashes in a prison in Jeddah as a court-ordered punishment, a Saudi newspaper reported on Wednesday ...

Beirut’s National Museum has opened its basement of ancient treasures for the first time in four decades to show the public its stunning array of funerary art, including the world’s largest collection of anthropoid sarcophogi.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and visiting Italian President Sergio Mattarella review the honour guard during a welcome ceremony in the West Bank town of Bethlehem yesterday. Mattarella is on a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.