The Saudi-led coalition battling rebels in Yemen said it would allow humanitarian flights into Sanaa's international airport from Monday, after several days' closure due to renewed hostilities around the capital.

Syrian and Russian warplanes have launched a wave of air strikes in northern Syria, killing dozens in areas held by a rebel alliance battling to take control of second city Aleppo.

Six long-range bombers from Russia on Sunday destroyed Islamic State group weapon stores around the jihadist stronghold of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, the defense ministry in Moscow said.

Libyan pro-government forces pressed an advance against the Islamic State group in the coastal city of Sirte on Sunday as they battled jihadists holed up in waterfront residential areas.

A ten-year-old Syrian girl shot in the besieged town of Madaya was evacuated Sunday to a Damascus hospital where she is in a stable condition, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Saudi-led coalition Sunday denied targeting a Yemeni school in air strikes that killed 10 children, instead saying it bombed a camp at which Iran-backed rebels train underage soldiers.

The nephew of the governor of a key province where Iraqi forces are battling the Islamic State group has been gunned down in the country's north, officials said Saturday.

The shooting in Iraqi Kurdish regional capital Arbil came just hours after Nowfal al-Aqoub, the governor of Nineveh, made controversial remarks about children being fathered by IS fighters in the province.

The Islamic State group has freed hundreds of civilians used by the jihadists as human shields while retreating in northern Syria, US-backed forces and a monitor said Saturday.

A source from the Syrian Democratic Forces, which pushed IS out of the city of Manbij this week with the aid of US-led air strikes, told Agence France Presse that some of the civilians were able to escape while "others were freed".

As Iraqi political and military attention shifts north in the fight against the Islamic State group, the military victories that have put Iraqi forces on Mosul's doorstep have left behind shattered cities, towns and communities in Iraq's Sunni heartland.

Anbar has witnessed the most successful military phase of the ground fight against IS to date. But rather than restore government order, services and security, liberation at the hands of Iraqi forces closely backed by the U.S.-led coalition has merely moved many Anbaris from one waiting room into another.

Coalition-supported local forces fighting the Islamic State group in northern Syria have recaptured large areas around the city of Manbij and put the jihadists "on the ropes," a Pentagon official said Friday.

Since the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) began an operation to capture Manbij on May 21, they have wrested control of more than 1,000 square kilometers (385 square miles) of territory from IS.