Tunisia's transition to democracy serves as an example of how to defeat extremists such as the Islamic State jihadist group, the leader of the country's powerful Islamist movement said.

"The success of the Tunisian experience is in the international interest, especially in the fight against extremism and the fight against Islamic State and similar groups," Ennahda head Rached Ghannouchi said in an interview with AFP in the runup to the country's first parliamentary election on Sunday since its 2011 revolution.

Four women in Saudi Arabia have been jailed for preparing their sons to wage war and for supporting al-Qaida, official media said, in the kingdom's latest "terrorist" convictions.

They were sentenced to between six and 10 years in prison, the Saudi Press Agency reported late Wednesday following the verdicts.

U.S.-led air strikes in Syria were reported Thursday to have killed more than 500 jihadists in a month, as Kurdish fighters readied to reinforce the embattled border town of Kobane.

An AFP correspondent across the frontier in Turkey reported fierce clashes and fresh air raids in Kobane, with heavy gun and mortar fire rocking its western side in the evening.

Within hours of his arrest by police, Walid Denguir was dead -- just one of many alleged torture victims at the centre of a fight for justice in post-revolution Tunisia.

More than three years since a pro-democracy uprising toppled long-time strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, rights groups say change has been slow to reach the country's justice system.

Four former Blackwater security guards were convicted Wednesday in the 2007 shootings of more than 30 Iraqis in Baghdad, an incident that inflamed anti-American sentiment around the globe and was denounced by critics as an illustration of a war gone horribly wrong.

The men claimed self-defense, but U.S. prosecutors argued that they had shown "a grave indifference" to the carnage their actions would cause. All four were ordered immediately to jail.

Israel on Thursday pledged a tough response to any further attacks in Jerusalem as police flooded flashpoint Arab neighborhoods a day after a Palestinian car attack killed a baby.

It was the second deadly incident involving a Palestinian driving a vehicle in three months and prompted a sharp warning from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A Saudi court Wednesday condemned 14 people to jail terms of between six months and 23 years, in a second batch of sentences over a plot to attack U.S. forces in neighboring Qatar.

The defendants were convicted of "joining a terrorist cell that aimed to launch a terrorist attack against U.S. forces in Qatar," state news agency SPA said in a statement.

Car bombs near a maternity hospital and a service station in Baghdad killed at least 28 people Wednesday, the latest in a spate of blasts to hit the city, police and medics said.

One blast struck across the street from the hospital in the frequently targeted Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, killing at least 10, a police colonel said. Another 29 were wounded.

A Turkish woman was arrested on suspicion of blasphemy and inciting religious hatred after allegedly stepping on the Koran and then posting the picture on Twitter, media reported on Wednesday.

The arrest came after Melih Gokcek, Ankara's controversial mayor from the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), launched a criminal complaint against the 38-year-old-woman, who uses the Twitter handle @kedibiti (cat lice).

The Islamic State jihadist group has again surrounded Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, where it trapped thousands of civilians this summer, commanders in the area said Wednesday.

The civilians, mostly members of the Yazidi religious minority, eventually escaped via Syria with the help of Kurdish fighters from Iraq's neighbor to the west, but that route has now been cut.