King Salman of Saudi Arabia will visit Russia on Thursday, senior Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov was quoted by the TASS news agency as saying.

A roadside bomb blast killed a military member of the US-led coalition in Iraq fighting the Islamic State group, the US military said Monday.

Norway has agreed to host former Israeli nuclear technician and whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, his Norwegian wife has told local television.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday denied Turkish claims of covert involvement in Iraqi Kurdistan's recent independence vote, reiterating however his "sympathy" for the Kurdish people.

Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslim pilgrims gathered in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala on Sunday for ceremonies marking the seventh-century killing of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson.

Syria's war killed at least 3,000 people including 955 civilians in September, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said Sunday, in the deadliest month of the conflict this year.

"More than 70 percent of the civilians were killed in regime and Russian air strikes, or in air raids of the international coalition" fighting the Islamic State group, the Britain-based monitor's head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

A university in Saudi Arabia has said it will open a driving school for women, in a first for the ultra-conservative country after a ban on women driving was lifted.

"Princess Nourah University is preparing to set up a driving school in cooperation with the relevant authorities," the women's university said on Saturday.

Iran has embargoed exports and imports of fuel products to and from Iraqi Kurdistan in response to the region's controversial independence referendum, Iranian media reported on Saturday.

Just after sunrise outside Syria's Raqa, dozens of Islamic State group jihadists donned Kurdish military uniforms, piled into cars with weapons, and broke back into a district they lost control of months ago.

Iraq's military prepared Saturday to take control of the international borders of the northern Kurdish region.

The move is part of the central government's stepped-up efforts to isolate the Kurds following their vote on independence earlier this week.