Wearing clean bullet-proof vests and knee pads, fighters from a new Syrian amy battalion showcase the skills they have learned from Russia's military advisers.

Israel's president meets Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his challenger Benny Gantz on Wednesday as the clock begins ticking on a one-week deadline for him to name someone to form a government.

Two million children are out of school in war-torn Yemen, a fourth of whom have dropped out since the conflict escalated in March 2015, the UN children's agency said Wednesday.

An Algerian military court has sentenced the brother of former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and three co-defendants to 15 years in prison, the state APS news agency reported on Wednesday.

Seven children were among 16 people killed Tuesday in twin air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition fighting rebels in southern Yemen, an official and a doctor said.

Two rockets landed near the US embassy in Baghdad overnight, security sources told AFP early Tuesday, with foreign diplomats there reporting emergency sirens repeatedly going off.

Eight babies were killed when a fire ripped through a maternity hospital in eastern Algeria before dawn on Tuesday, emergency services said.

The US and Turkey launched a second round of joint patrols in northeastern Syria on Tuesday as part of plans to create a "safe" buffer zone, the Turkish defence ministry said.

The United Nations announced Monday the long-awaited creation of a constitution-writing committee on Syria that will include the government and opposition, but it remained to be seen if the step could finally end the civil war. 

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres hailed the committee as the first step toward finding a political settlement to the conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in more than eight years of fighting.

Two Turkish soldiers were killed on Monday in northern Iraq in an attack blamed on Kurdish militants, the defence ministry said.