A suicide bomber killed at least 35 people and wounded dozens in a crowded market in the Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad on Monday, the eve of the Eid al-Adha festival, security and hospital sources said.

Muslim pilgrims ascended Saudi Arabia’s Mount Arafat yesterday in the high point of this year’s hajj, being held in downsized form and under coronavirus restrictions for the second year running.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday hit out an EU court ruling allowing employers in some cases to ban staff from wearing headscarves at work.

Spyware Pegasus, which is sold by the NSO Group of Israel, may have been used to conduct surveillance on about 300 Indians, including two serving Cabinet ministers at the Centre, three opposition leaders, a Constitutional authority, government officials, scientists and about 40 journalists, according to French media nonprofit, Forbidden Stories, and Amnesty International.

Researchers believe that early versions of the hacking software, first detected in 2016, used booby-trapped text messages to install itself onto the phones of targets.  The recipient would have to click on a link in the message in order for the spyware to download.

Hajj pilgrims streamed out of the holy city of Makkah and into the Mina valley yesterday, launching the rituals of the great pilgrimage which Saudi Arabia is holding in a scaled-down form for a second year.

Syrian regime artillery fire killed seven civilians including three children in the country’s last major rebel bastion of Idlib, a Britain-based war monitor said yesterday.

The United States on Saturday accused Tehran of an “outrageous” effort to deflect blame for the impasse in Iran nuclear talks and denied that any agreement had been reached on a prisoner swap.

President Bashar al-Assad took the oath of office for a fourth term in war-ravaged Syria on Saturday, after officially winning 95 percent of the vote in an election dismissed abroad.

Pilgrims began arriving in the holy city of Makkah yesterday for the second downsized hajj staged during the coronavirus pandemic, circling Islam’s holiest site in masks and on distanced paths. 

Syrian President Bashar Assad was sworn in Saturday for a fourth seven-year term in the war-torn country.

Ankara said Thursday it had uncovered a mass grave containing dozens of bodies in a Turkish-held region of Syria, accusing a US-backed Kurdish militia of the killings.

A spyware campaign using tools from a secretive Israeli firm was used to attack and impersonate dozens of human rights activists, journalists, dissidents, politicians and others, researchers said Thursday.

Lebanese politician Saad al-Hariri abandoned his months-long effort to form a new government on Thursday, dimming the chances of a cabinet being agreed any time soon that could start rescuing the country from financial meltdown.  

The Taliban have offered a three-month ceasefire in exchange for the release of 7,000 insurgent prisoners, an Afghan government negotiator said yesterday, as Pakistan confirmed the militant group had control of a key border crossing.

Archaeologists said Wednesday that the recent discovery of two stretches of stone bulwark from the Iron Age “unequivocally” prove a huge wall once protected the entire eastern flank of ancient Jerusalem.

Shelling by Syrian regime forces yesterday killed nine civilians, including three children, in the Idlib region in the country’s northwest, a war monitor reported.

Iran is not prepared to resume negotiations on coming back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal until Iranian President-elect Ebrahim Raisi’s administration has begun, a diplomatic source said on Wednesday.

The Israeli army yesterday said it had arrested between 20 and 30 Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank it accused of being “terror operatives” of Islamist group Hamas.  

Days after the Taliban captured a remote district in Afghanistan’s north, they issued their first orders in the form of a letter to the local imam.