A suicide attack in an oasis town south of Baghdad killed eight people and wounded at least six on Monday, Iraqi officials said.

Syrian government forces clashed with rebels on the outskirts of eastern Aleppo city yesterday, a monitor said, after residents received messages from the army giving opposition fighters 24 hours to leave.

The Iraqi military said Sunday that soldiers south of Mosul have recaptured the Nimrud area, home to the site of an ancient Assyrian city that was blown up by the Islamic State group.

Elite Iraqi forces engaged in “intense” fighting with militants in eastern Mosul yesterday, an officer said, as civilians who had been trapped by the fighting sought to flee the city.

Candidates in Kuwait’s parliamentary elections have focused their campaigns on government austerity measures as the oil-dependent Gulf country faces financial stress due to low crude prices.

Prevented from reuniting with their husbands and fending off marriage proposals from militant fighters, women living alone under Islamic State militant group rule in Syria face a special set of challenges.

Elite Iraqi forces were engaged in "intense" fighting with jihadists in eastern Mosul on Saturday as they tried to fortify positions before advancing further into the city, an officer said.

Iraqi special forces said they pushed deeper into Mosul yesterday despite heavy resistance from Islamic State militants using civilians as cover, and were holding half a dozen city neighbourhoods seized in the last 10 days.

Saudi Arabia's government has set aside 100 billion riyals ($26.7 billion) to pay debts that it owes to private sector companies after payment delays that have lasted months, an official document seen by Reuters shows.

Turkey detained on Friday the head of the board of opposition daily Cumhuriyet, which saw nine of its staff arrested last week, the newspaper said.

A Turkish district governor wounded in a bomb attack on his office in the largely Kurdish southeast has died in hospital, the state-run Anadolu Agency and other media said on Friday.

The battle for Palestinian statehood consumed Yasser Arafat’s life and a new museum in his name puts the nature of that fight front and centre – the sub-machine gun on his desk, the AK-47 assault rifle in the corner, the pistol at his side.