Iraqi forces battled Islamic State militants in their stronghold of Mosul on Wednesday and took control of the last major road leading west from the city, before bomb blasts ripped through a wedding party near Tikrit, killing more than 20 people. The blasts in the village of Hajjaj, reported...

ISIS has lost most of the land it once held in Iraq and Syria but hopes to cling to scraps of a self-declared caliphate, a US official said Wednesday. Since summer 2014, when ISIS was at its peak just ahead of the US-led war on the group, the extremists have lost 65 percent of the land...

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has cancelled a planned rally in Rotterdam, where he had been due to campaign in favor of a proposed new Turkish constitution that gives more powers to the country's president, Dutch news agency ANP reported on Wednesday. The news agency quoted from...

Israel's parliament gave preliminary approval Wednesday to two measures that would limit calls to prayers from mosques, including one prohibiting the use of loudspeakers at all hours, a parliament statement said. The second of the bills would ban loudspeakers between 11 pm and 7 am in urban...