Brett McGurk, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for the global anti-IS coalition, tweets that U.S.-led coalition air forces are supporting Iraqi troops as they push to retake IS's remaining strongholds in Ramadi.
Egypt has hired global consultancy Control Risks to review security at some of its airports, tourism minister Hisham Zaazou has said, after a plane carrying Russian tourists crashed over the Sinai Peninsula in October killing all aboard.
Russia said in November that the plane was brought down by a bomb. The IS group claimed responsibility, saying that its local Sinai affiliate had smuggled a bomb on board hidden in a soft drink can.
But Egypt has said that it has so far found no evidence of terrorism linked to the disaster.
The United Nations is mulling "light touch" options for monitoring a possible ceasefire in Syria that would keep its risks to a minimum by relying largely on Syrians already on the ground, diplomatic sources have told Reuters.
The UN Security Council called last week on the UN Secretary General to draw up options for monitoring a cease fire in Syria.
The yearlong story of attacks by Islamic State militants and the intensifying global effort to defeat the IS group has been voted the top news story of 2015, according to AP's annual poll of U.S. editors and news directors.
Russia's ambassador to London has said that Britain and the United States are refusing to provide Moscow with information about IS militant positions in Syria, pro-Kremlin news agency RIA Novosti reports.
Yakovenko said that Moscow asked Washington and London to provide Russia with the coordinates of their targets but were refused.
"Everyone has their plans. By the way, we asked the Americans and the British, if you have any information, share it with us, give us the coordinates of your targets. But they refused. So we have to rely on our own sources of information," Yakovenko said.
Counter-terrorism forces are searching for the leaders of an estimated 1,000 Islamic State sympathizers across Indonesia after a string of raids that led to the arrest of several men suspected of planning bomb attacks, police have said.
The Boko Haram militant group in Nigeria has kept more than one million children out of school, the UN's children's agency has said.
Over 2,000 schools are closed across Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger while hundreds of others have been attacked, looted or burned down by Boko Haram extremists in their mission to create an independent Islamic state, UNICEF says.
Boko Haram, the northeastern Nigerian Islamist group, has been even more deadly than the IS group this year, the LA Times reports.
And each time Nigeria's army seems to have made substantial inroads toward wiping it out, the group has quietly rebuilt. Its members cut the throats of schoolboys, casting them aside to bleed to death in the sandy dust. And they behead victims, like Islamic State, videotaping the atrocities.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has condemned a weekend attack on the rebel-held Syrian city of Idlib believed to have been carried out by Russian warplanes and said Syrian territory will not be part of "Russian imperialist goals".
Air strikes killed scores of people in the center of Idlib on December 20, rescue workers and residents said.
Iraqi forces have retaken the Al-Bakr neighborhood in south eastern Ramadi, Almadapress,.com is reporting, citing a source in Iraq's counter terrorism forces.
Iraqi forces entered central Ramadi this morning as part of a final push to recapture the city -- the capital of Anbar province -- from IS.