Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will speak Friday by telephone with U.S. President Donald Trump in the first contact between the two leaders since Trump took office in January. Trump's planned phone call to Abbas was revealed in a White House notice. Abbas has spent many hours on the...

A helicopter crashed in the outskirts of Istanbul Friday after apparently hitting a television tower in dense fog, killing at least five people, reports said. The private Dogan news agency said the helicopter, with two pilots, four foreign nationals and a Turkish citizen on board, crashed on...

A female member of the Palestinian parliament has been arrested by Israeli forces, Palestinian and Israeli security sources said Thursday. Samira Halayqa, a Hamas member of the largely defunct Palestinian Legislative Council, was arrested by Israeli forces on Wednesday night from her home...

Iraqi forces aim to dislodge ISIS militants from west Mosul within a month, despite gruelling urban combat in densely populated terrain, the head of the elite Counter Terrorism Service told Reuters on Thursday. As Iraqi forces advance deeper into west Mosul, they are facing increasingly...

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Thursday Turkey would strike against U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG militia in Manbij if they advanced into the Syrian city and found them present, according to NTV television. A spokesman for President Tayyip Erdogan said the YPG should move out of Manbij to...

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...

Yemen's Al-Qaeda has detained two militants accused of being U.S. informants in a district targeted by multiple air raids over the past week, a tribal leader said Wednesday. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) arrested two of its operatives in Mawjan district in the southern Abyan...

Iraqi forces in west Mosul worked to clear bombs and searched for extremist fighters in recaptured areas Wednesday to set the stage for renewed offensive operations, officers said. Iraqi security forces launched a major operation to retake west Mosul -- ISIS' last major urban bastion in the...

Iraq will continue hitting ISIS targets in Syria, as well as in neighboring countries if they give their approval, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Wednesday. "I respect the sovereignty of states, and I have secured the approval of Syria to strike positions (on its territory)," he...

Gunmen, including at least one dressed as a doctor, attacked a military hospital close to the U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul on Wednesday and were engaging security forces inside the building, officials and witnesses said. A security official said the attack began with an explosion...

Turkey's foreign minister accused Berlin Tuesday of exerting systematic pressure on Turkish citizens in Germany and hampering those who wanted to campaign in support of President Tayyip Erdogan's bid for new powers at a referendum next month. Mevlut Cavusoglu was speaking at a rally of...

Five suspected ISIS are to stand trial in Jordan on charges of planning a deadly suicide attack last year on the Syrian border, a judge said Tuesday. "We have referred the file of the five accused, who are Arab nationals, to the state security court to try them in the case of the terrorist...

Iraqi forces said Tuesday they had seized the main government offices in Mosul and its famed museum as they made steady progress in their battle to retake the city's west from jihadists. News of the advances came on the third day of a renewed offensive against the Islamic State group in west...

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Tuesday it was unfortunate that some of Turkey's allies had chosen the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia as a partner in the fight against ISIS in Syria. Yildirim's comments, at a news conference, were made as the military chiefs of Turkey, the United States...

 A new Israeli law banning entry to foreigners who support boycotting the country came under fire Tuesday from human rights groups and the opposition, who called it "thought control" harmful to Israel's international standing. The approval of the law late Monday was defended by...

Two children, aged 10 and 12, were killed in a suspected U.S. airstrike targeting al-Qaeda in central Yemen, a provincial official said Tuesday. The children had been tending a herd of goats on a mountain outside the village of Yakla, in Baida province, when the strike hit Sunday, the...

 More than 2,000 fighters sent from Iran have been killed in Iraq and Syria, the head of Iran's veterans' affairs office said Tuesday. "Some 2,100 martyrs have been martyred so far in Iraq or other places defending the holy mausoleums," Mohammad Ali Shahidi told the state-run IRNA news...