A family of six lost children lives quietly in a small apartment among strangers in this northern Iraqi city. The "man of the house," an 18-year-old, heads out each morning looking for day labor jobs to pay the rent. His 12-year-old sister acts as the mother, cooking meals, cleaning and caring for her young siblings.

Their home village is less than an hour's drive away, but they can't go back — Shiite militiamen burned down their house because their father belonged to the Islamic State group. And they fear retaliation by their former neighbors, so deep is the anger at the militants who once ruled this area.

Turkey will search the Saudi consulate in Istanbul later on Monday as part of an investigation into the disappearance of prominent journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Turkish diplomatic source said.

President Michel Aoun hailed on Monday the reopening of a key trade route between Syria and Jordan, once vital for the transit of goods in the Middle East, describing it as beneficial for Lebanon’s productive sector.

The disappearance of journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi after visiting a Saudi consulate in Turkey has thrown the large number of diplomatic vacancies under President Donald Trump into the spotlight — notably in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It's a gap the administration says it has been trying to fix but with limited success.

Khashoggi's case and the fact that there are no American ambassadors in either Ankara or Riyadh have prompted concerns about dozens of unfilled senior State Department positions almost two years into Trump's presidency. And, those concerns have sparked an increasingly bitter battle with Congress over who is to blame.

The disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi diplomatic mission in Turkey has fueled calls for the United States to reconsider arms sales to the kingdom that have been championed by President Donald Trump.

A Saudi delegation has arrived in Turkey for talks on missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi, officials said on Friday, with Riyadh and Ankara sharply at odds over how he disappeared last week from the kingdom's Istanbul consulate.

As the controversy intensified, the Washington Post reported Turkey had recordings made from inside the building that allegedly proved their claims Khashoggi had been tortured and killed at the consulate.

Nearly defeated on the battlefields of its would-be caliphate, analysts say the Islamic State group has reverted to what it was before its spectacular conquests in 2014 — a shadowy insurgent network that targets civilian populations with guerrilla-style attacks and exploits state weaknesses to incite sectarian strife.

In Iraq and Syria, hardly a week goes by without the group staging an attack on a town or village, keeping its opponents on edge even as it fights U.S.-backed forces advancing on the last remaining slice of territory under its control near the countries' shared border.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia will form a "joint working group" to look into the disappearance of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, a Turkish official said on Thursday.

The journalist vanished last week after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

President Donald Trump says the U.S. is looking into the fate of a Saudi writer missing and feared murdered but expressed reservations over calls to withhold further U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, warning that such a move "would be hurting us."

Decades of close U.S.-Saudi relations, which have only intensified under Trump, appeared in jeopardy by the suggestion of a "carefully plotted murder" of a government critic, Jamal Khashoggi, 59, who disappeared a week ago after entering a Saudi consulate in Turkey. The wealthy former government insider had been living in the U.S. in self-imposed exile.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's top ministers are squabbling, a deadline looms for contentious legislation that may bring down his government and a corruption indictment could be just around the corner.

Against this backdrop, there are growing signs he may soon call for elections — possibly as early as next week, when parliament reconvenes from its summer break. And though Netanyahu hasn't committed yet, conditions appear ripe for him to schedule the vote, nearly a year ahead of schedule.