Their last Syrian bastion is levelled and burned, they are using rifles to battle warplanes and tanks, but the hardline jihadists holding out in Baghouz are still putting up a fight.

International donors on Thursday pledged nearly $7 billion in aid for 2019 for civilians caught up in Syria's bloody civil war but the total fell short of what the U.N. says is needed.

EU Humanitarian Commissioner Christos Stylianides announced the total at the end of a three-day conference of 80 countries and organizations in Brussels, on the eve of the eighth anniversary of the start of the conflict.

The Trump administration used an annual human rights report to call out Saudi Arabia on Wednesday over the October killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The State Department annual global human rights report said The Washington Post columnist was killed by agents of the kingdom, a close U.S. partner, while he was inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. It drew no conclusion as to who was responsible, despite the belief of intelligence agencies and lawmakers that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder.

The US Senate on Wednesday dealt a stinging bipartisan rebuke to Donald Trump's foreign policy and his alliance with Riyadh, voting to end support for the bloody Saudi-led war effort in Yemen.

Qatar's Cabinet on Wednesday approved proposals to allow foreigners to own property and be granted residency at the same time, according to an official statement.

Bashar al-Assad has won his war for political survival but as Syria's conflict enters its ninth year, his country is fractured, cash-strapped, and prey to both friend and foe.

Hundreds of school teachers and students protested in the Algerian capital on Wednesday amid fears that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika plans to extend his two-decade rule.

Ten Saudi women detained last year in a sweeping crackdown on activists appeared in court on Wednesday, an official said, intensifying scrutiny of the kingdom's human rights record.

US-backed forces said Wednesday the Islamic State group was living its "final moments" after thunderous shelling on its last scrap of land in eastern Syria prompted 3,000 jihadists to surrender.

But the die-hard IS fighters who stayed to defend the remnants of their "caliphate" struck back with a wave of suicide bombings, according to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Wednesday accused Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a "tyrant" who "massacred" Palestinian babies, in the latest exchange between the two leaders.