Around 350,000 children are trapped in western Mosul, Save the Children warned on Sunday as Iraqi forces launched a fresh offensive on extremists defending the strategic city.

Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the founder and the spiritual leader of the Cairo-based Gamaa Islamiya (Islamic Group) movement, died at the age of 79 in U.S., his son announced Saturday.

At least 15 people were killed, including eight police personnel, and over 90 injured in two separate blasts in northwest and southwest Pakistan on Monday, officials and local media reported.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has condemned a fresh Israeli attempt to ban the Muslim call to prayer (Adhan) being broadcast through loudspeakers.

Civilians, mostly women and children, were killed last week in air raids by NATO forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, an initial United Nations inquiry suggested.

At least six people were killed Saturday when a Taliban bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into Afghan soldiers who had queued outside a bank in southern Helmand province to collect their salaries, officials said.

At least seven people were killed in fierce clashes that erupted in central Baghdad on Saturday between security forces and protesters demanding reforms to Iraq’s electoral system, police said.

The Syrian government has executed thousands of prisoners in mass hangings and carried out systematic torture at a military jail near Damascus, rights watchdog Amnesty International said on Tuesday.

A suicide bomber on foot ripped through a crowd of Afghan Supreme Court employees Tuesday, killing at least 20 people and wounding 41 others in the second attack on government institutions in under a month.

At least 15 people died in air strikes on the rebel-held Syrian city of Idlib on Tuesday, in some of the heaviest raids there in months, residents and a rescue worker said.