Three suspected al-Qaida militants on a motorbike were killed Wednesday as a bomb they were transporting exploded in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, a security official said.

The Islamic State group has lost 22 percent of the territory it held at the start of 2015, military analysts IHS Jane's said Wednesday, as U.S. and Russian air strikes have helped the jihadists' opponents advance.

IS controls swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria but lost 14 percent of it last year and a further eight percent this year, according to the IHS Conflict Monitor.

A Saudi national convicted of murder was executed Wednesday, bringing to 73 the number of people put to death in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom this year, the interior ministry said.

Omar al-Rabie was found guilty of shooting to death Ghanem Salem following a dispute, the ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency SPA.

Two-thirds of Syria's Christians have left the country, an Aleppo bishop said Wednesday, blaming violence and insecurity spread by extremist groups and insisting most Christians still support the Syrian president.

Chaldean Catholic bishop Antoine Audo said there were about 1.5 million Christians in the country before the start of the conflict in March 2011.

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday will bestow state awards on Russian military personnel who fought in Syria after ordering the withdrawal of armed forces from the war-torn country, the Kremlin said.

More than 700 soldiers and officers from the Russian air forces, ground forces and navy, and other military officials, have been invited to take part in the ceremony, the Kremlin said in a statement on Wednesday.

Libya's unrecognized authorities in control of Tripoli warned a new U.N.-backed unity government on Wednesday that it would not be welcome in the capital.

"A government that has been imposed from abroad without the consensus of Libyans... has no place amongst us," the so-called Tripoli government said in a statement.

A Saudi-led coalition's major military operations in Yemen are nearing an end, its spokesman said Wednesday, but the country will need long-term support to avoid becoming "another Libya".

During an interview with AFP in his office at a Riyadh airbase, Brigadier General Ahmed al-Assiri also said fighting along the Saudi-Yemeni border had essentially stopped after a mediation effort last week.

Nearly 2,000 migrants and two corpses have been recovered from people smugglers' boats off Libya since Tuesday, Italy's coastguard said Wednesday.

Further rescue operations were ongoing, a spokesman told AFP.

An Iraqi army plane crashed during a reconnaissance flight near the city of Kirkuk on Wednesday and its three crew went missing, a high-ranking military source said, blaming a "technical problem".

The Islamic State jihadist group claimed it had shot down an Iraqi military plane in the area, killing five crew members.

A Qatari poet, Rashid al-Ajami, has been pardoned and released after serving more than three years of a 15-year prison sentence for insulting the emir, a family member said Wednesday.

"Yes it's true and we have nothing to say but 'Thank God,'" the family member of Ajami, jailed for insulting the emir and trying to overthrow the regime, told AFP, asking not to be named.