CAIRO (AP) — It has been a week of stunning advances by Islamic militants across a belt from Iraq to Pakistan. In Iraq, jihadi fighters rampaged through the country's second-largest city and swept farther south in their drive to establish an extremist enclave stretching into Syria....

In desperate efforts to gain ground on battlefields, frustrated governments in the Mideast and Africa are using barrel bombs against their enemies, launching the cheap, quickly manufactured weapons as a crude counter to roadside blasts and suicide explosions that insurgents have...

Guided more by what they can hear than see, Syrian troops and rebels are battling in the bowels of Damascus, digging tunnels in a campaign to control the eastern entrance to the capital. This is the suburb of Jobar, next to Abassid Square, a stronghold of President Bashar...

  ALEPPO, Syria — Standing amid dust and rubble, Abu Ahmad remembers better times in Hanano, a neighborhood in east Aleppo. "I still miss the old men there, sitting on the streets, inviting strangers to have tea with them," said the 28-year-old former computer programmer....