Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II attempted on Monday to reassure Egyptians after the recent attacks on Copts in North Sinai, stressing that the Coptic families that have fled the governorate out of fear of terrorist violence will return to the city "when the time is right." At the start of this month, the Coptic Orthodox Church announced that 143 Christian families had fled North Sinai to Ismailiya after a spate of killings of Christians by Islamist militants in the governorate.

Islamic State's branch in the Sinai Peninsula posted a video on Tuesday depicting the beheading of two men the militant Islamist group said it had found guilty of practicing witchcraft and sorcery. The video, posted on a Telegram channel often used by IS, showed the group forming a religious police unit known as the Hasbah in northern Sinai, where it has waged an insurgency for years. The rugged, thinly populated peninsula borders Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal.

Islamic State-affiliate Province of Sinai released a promotional video on Tuesday showing members of the organization carrying out what it alleges to be Hisba, or religious policing. The group claimed the footage is from locations in North Sinai, which it did not identify. Hisba is defined by religious scholars as the practice of commanding virtue and forbidding vice, professor of Islamic law professor at Al-Azhar University Ahmed Kareema told the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper. He added that Hisba should be conducted by a select few who must be efficient, fair, knowledgeable and capable, describing it as a type of guardianship falling to those who have been entrusted with religious matters.

Pro-government media is reporting that Syrian troops have taken up a position allowing them to fire down on a supply route between an Islamic State-held town on the Iraqi border and a nearby desert outpost. Pro-government forces are closing in on the frontier town of Boukamal, the last major IS stronghold in the country after the militants were driven from their de facto capital in the northern city of Raqqa as well as the eastern town of Mayadeen.

A wave of unprecedented violent attacks against police and army forces have surfaced in Egypt, spurring questions about Egypt s political scene, the nature of these attacks and terrorist affiliations. These incidences spiked in the wake of the June 30th uprisings, that led to the overthrow of Islamist Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi. Reports that the IS affiliated group of Sinai Province , attacked another police or army checkpoint in North Sinai have become routine to Egyptians. Attacks that take place in Cairo, near the outskirts or even inside the Delta governorates, have become synonymous with two militant groups suspected to be MB affiliated, Lewaa El Thawra and Hasm .

Giza Criminal Court convicted 26 defendants on Sunday, four of whom have been tried in absentia, on terrorism charges in the case known in the media as the ‘Giza Terrorist Cell’ case. The court sentenced 11 defendants to death, 14 others to lifetime imprisonment, and a minor to 10 years in prison.

German federal prosecutors have opened up more than 900 terrorism-related cases so far this year, including 800 related to radical Islamists, according to report published in the German language “Welt am Sonntag” on Sunday. The number of terrorism cases has jumped nearly four-fold compared to last year, when federal prosecutors opened about 250 proceedings. In 2013, there were about 80 terrorism cases in the courts.

An Egyptian court has set November 11 as the date of the first trial hearing of a man charged with killing a Coptic priest and injuring another in Cairo last week, a judicial source told Ahram Online on Thursday. The prosecution charged forty-year-old Ahmed El-Sonbaty with premeditated murder in the killing of Arch Priest Samaan Shehataa, who hailed from Beni Suef Governorate in Upper Egypt.

With the rise of numerous unofficial Fatwas — rulings on a point of Islamic law given by a recognized authority — that are being issued from clerics who are affiliated with Egypt’s top Muslim authority Al-Azhar, a desire to censor these rulings has surfaced in Egypt’s political and media spheres. During a recent conference sponsored by Al-Azhar, the deputy head of the institution Abbas Showman said that it is necessary to guarantee that all Fatwas circulated in Egypt are being issued from the official entities of Al-Azhar.

Until the summer of 2016, South Sudan s Yei region was a leafy oasis in the midst of the country s civil war. But when a national peace deal broke down and government soldiers ransacked the area, a handful of UN and US officials begged their leaders for help. The United Nations must send peacekeepers to Yei to protect civilians from President Salva Kiir s forces, who are burning villages and slaughtering men, women and children, they argued. And the US needs to change its approach in the face of a potential genocide, they warned.

In a brief statement before a conference on "The role of fatwas (Islamic edicts) in stabilising society", Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed El-Tayeb said Islam s teachings and legacy face an unprecedented wave of distortion at the hands of those who issue fatwas without licences and adequate knowledge. "Unfortunately, some have been allowed to issue flawed fatwas that distort Islamic Sharia and violate Islam s true teachings," said El-Tayeb, urging Islamic scholars and clerics to take utmost care when issuing fatwas.

US-backed forces took full control of Raqa from the Islamic State (IS) militant group on Tuesday, defeating the last IS holdouts in the de facto Syrian capital of their now-shattered "caliphate". The victory caps a battle of more than four months for Raqa, and hammers another nail in the coffin of the IS experiment in statehood, which has collapsed in the face of offensives in Syria and Iraq.

US-backed militias said they had defeated Islamic State in its former capital Raqqa on Tuesday, raising their flags over the jihadist group’s last footholds in the city after a four-month battle. The fighting was over but the alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias was clearing the stadium of mines and any remaining militants, said Rojda Felat, commander of the Raqqa campaign for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Cairo was named on Monday as the most dangerous megacity for women by an international poll with women’s rights experts saying the treatment of women in the Egyptian capital has worsened since a 2011 uprising seeking social change. Cairo came out worst when the Thomson Reuters Foundation asked experts on women’s issues in 19 megacities how well women are protected from sexual violence, harmful cultural practices, and about access to healthcare and finance..

A senior security source at the Interior Ministry announced the death of three policemen in a terrorist attack on a branch of the National Bank of Egypt in central Sinai on Monday. In a statement to the Middle East News Agency on Monday, the security source said that a number of terrorists attacked the bank and planted five explosive devices in the vicinity of the branch.

The death toll from the most powerful bomb blast witnessed in Somalia’s capital rose to 189 with more than 200 injured, making it the deadliest single attack ever in the Horn of Africa nation, police and hospital sources said Sunday. Doctors struggled to assist horrifically wounded victims, many burnt beyond recognition. Officials feared the toll would continue to climb from Saturday’s truck bomb that targeted a busy street near key ministries. Sources for the death toll spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

The army fended off a terror attack on a security checkpoint in the Kawadis area in North Sinai on Sunday, killing 24 militants, a statement by army spokesperson Tamer El-Refaei said. The spokesperson added that six army personnel were killed during the fight.

A Coptic priest affiliated with a church in Upper Egypt’s governorate of Beni Suef was killed on Thursday due to being stabbed by a man in Cairo’s northeastern suburb of El–Marg, state-run newspaper of Akhbar Al Youm reported. The priest, Samaan Shehta, was in Cairo when a young unemployed man blocked the way in front of the priest’s vehicle and asked him to step down from it. He then hit the priest’s head with cleaver and ran away, a local journalist told Egypt Independent on condition of anonymity.

Pope Francis will talk peace on his to visit Myanmar, a Catholic church representative said Thursday, a potentially highly charged trip during a refugee crisis that has seen 520,000 Rohingya Muslims pushed out of the country. The late November visit comes as western Rakhine state is devoured by communal violence that has sent unprecedented numbers of Rohingya fleeing into neighbouring Bangladesh.

Pakistan s electoral commission on Wednesday barred from contesting elections a new political party that is backed by an Islamist with a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head, a government official said. Haroon Khan, a spokesman for the commission, said a four-man panel rejected the registration of Milli Muslim League (MML) as an official political party. Khan said Muhammad Raza Khan, chief of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), told MML s lawyer at the final hearing of the registration that the new party has links with militant groups and as such "We can t enlist you."

Talks for the safe exit of civilians trapped in Syria s Raqa were underway Wednesday, as US-backed forces prepare a final push to recapture the city from the Islamic State (IS) militant group. The Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, have taken around 90 percent of the city from IS since they broke into the city in June. The US-backed militia has surrounded remaining IS fighters in just a handful of positions, but thousands of civilians are still in the city, some of them being used as human shields by IS.