Turkish-backed rebel fighters on Sunday captured the northern Syrian town of Dabiq from the Islamic State jihadist group, a monitoring group and rebels said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out Saturday at a local NGO whose head spoke against settlements at the United Nations, pledging legislation to impair its activities. 

Three U.S. warships in the Red Sea detected what may have been missiles fired at them on Saturday but none hit, the U.S. military said, amid rising tensions with Yemen's Huthi rebels.

U.S. officials initially said that surface-to-surface missiles had been fired at the USS Mason, USS Nitze and USS Ponce off the coast of Yemen starting around 1930 GMT, though it was unclear how many.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to build momentum behind a new drive to end the Syrian civil war Sunday after high-level talks with Russia and the country's neighbors.

An Omani aircraft landed in the rebel-held Yemeni capital on Saturday to evacuate 115 of the most seriously wounded from a Saudi-led coalition strike on a funeral last weekend, a rebel official said.

A suicide bomber attacked a Shiite-majority area of north Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 19 people and wounding more than two dozen, security and medical officials said.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has defended what he described as "tough but unavoidable" reforms ahead of a $12-billion International Monetary Fund loan to revive his country's ailing economy.

A leading Syrian opposition group slammed international talks on Saturday in Lausanne aimed at ending the five-year war, as warplanes pressed fierce raids on second city Aleppo. 

Abdal Ahad Stefo, deputy head of the Istanbul-based National Coalition opposition body, told AFP the talks "will only lead to wasting more time, further procrastination, and the shedding of more Syrian blood". 

The Saudi-led coalition battling Yemeni rebels said Saturday that one of its warplanes had "wrongly targeted" a funeral in the capital Sanaa, killing more than 140 people, and announced disciplinary proceedings.

The October 8 strike prompted an international outcry and strong criticism even from Saudi Arabia's closest Western allies.

Egypt's military launched air strikes against jihadist targets in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, the army said, after the Islamic State group killed 12 soldiers at a checkpoint.