Turkey said on Monday Islamic State (IS) jihadists must be totally pushed out of the Syrian border region, after a weekend suicide bombing in the city of Gaziantep blamed on the group left at least 54 dead.

"Our border must be completely cleansed from Daesh," Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in televised remarks, using an Arabic acronym for the IS group.

Israel said Monday its forces carried out dozens of air and tank strikes in Gaza on Sunday in response to a rocket that hit a southern Israeli town.

Israel targeted Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip by air and with tank fire Sunday after a rocket fired from the Palestinian enclave crashed into the Israeli city of Sderot.

Two Egyptian policemen were killed and five other people wounded as gunmen opened fire on a police checkpoint north of Cairo on Sunday, officials said.

Morocco's king on Saturday appealed for "a united front against extremism" and urged members of the North African country's diaspora, many of them in Europe, to defend a tolerant form of Islam.

Growing numbers of Westerners appear to be trying to join the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq before it's too late, frontline volunteer warriors say.

IS group jihadists have suffered a string of setbacks in Iraq and Syria in recent months, including the loss of key towns and facilities surrounding the remaining major strongholds in their self-declared "caliphate" -- Mosul in Iraq and Raqa in Syria.

Iraq on Sunday hanged 36 men convicted over the 2014 massacre by Sunni jihadists and allied militants of up to 1,700 military recruits, officials said.

They had been found guilty of involvement in the "Speicher" massacre, named after a base near Tikrit where the recruits were kidnapped before being executed in a massacre claimed by the Islamic State group.

The older brother of the little Syrian boy who was pictured sitting in an ambulance dazed and covered in blood after an air strike, died Saturday from wounds sustained in the attack on the family's apartment, a monitoring group said.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says his country is willing to accept a role for Syrian President Bashar Assad during a transitional period in Syria.

However, Yildirim told foreign media representatives on Saturday that Assad has no place in Syria's future.

Mosques are going up, women are covering up, and shops selling alcoholic beverages are shutting down in a changing Algeria where, slowly but surely, Muslim fundamentalists are gaining ground.

The North African country won its civil war with extremists who brought Algeria to its knees in the name of Islam during the 1990s. Yet authorities show little overt concern about the growing grip of Salafis, who apply a strict brand of the Muslim faith.