Syrian rebels launched Grad rockets at Aleppo's Nairab air base on Friday, part of their preparations for a new offensive aimed at breaking the government siege of insurgent-held areas of the city, a rebel official and a monitoring group said.

Shelling by Syrian rebels killed several children at a school in government-held western Aleppo on Thursday, state media and a monitoring group said, just a day after air strikes on a school in a rebel-held village in Idlib, 50km away.

The flow of Iranian natural gas to Turkey halted after an explosion hit a gas pipeline in eastern Turkey, a senior Iranian official told Iran's semi-official news agency Tasnim on Friday.

Islamic State fighters forced women, children and the elderly to walk alongside them for days as human shields to cover their retreat to Mosul, separating out older boys and fighting-aged men along the way for an unknown fate, villagers said.

Two Yazidi women who survived a nightmare ordeal of kidnapping, rape and slavery at the hands of Islamic State extremists yesterday won the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov human rights prize.

Tunisia yesterday denied a US news report it has allowed Washington to operate unmanned planes from its territory for missions in neighbouring Libya against the Islamic State group.

Some of the children among 50 Syrians, living in the rebel-held side of Aleppo, entering a government-controlled area as part of a ceasefire.

Warships from the US Navy and allied nations have intercepted four weapons shipments from Iran to war-ravaged Yemen since April 2015, a US admiral said Thursday.

US general told AFP on Thursday that between 800 and 900 Islamic State group fighters have been killed since the Iraqi-led operation to recapture Mosul from the jihadists began.

The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed suggestions from NATO that a Russian battle group in the Mediterranean would join the bombardment of Syria's Aleppo as absurd, the RIA news agency reported on Thursday.

Special forces from China and Saudi Arabia have held their first joint anti-terrorism drills, state media reported on Thursday, China's latest effort to expand security ties with countries in the Middle East and its Muslim neighbours.

Unesco’s World Heritage Committee yesterday voted to approve a resolution criticised by Israel as ignoring Jewish ties to a key holy site in Jerusalem, the second such decision approved by the UN body in a month.