A commander from Iran's Revolutionary Guards has been killed in Syria, media said Saturday, a disclosure that runs counter to Tehran's insistence it is not fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's forces.

Reports that Abdollah Eskandari died while "defending" a Shiite shrine emerged earlier this week but neither the elite military unit nor Iran's foreign ministry have passed comment.

Rival interim governments are disputing power in Tripoli less than four weeks before a general election, claiming control of Libya's huge currency reserves from oil and gas.

The power struggle is creating a quandary for foreign diplomats as the competing claimants trumpet their meetings as a vindication of their legitimacy.

Fez may be better known as Morocco's historic center of Islamic learning, but the modern-day university is a rare bastion of radical leftist students, where tensions are simmering after bloody clashes with Islamists.

Under the campus arcades, as students queue for lunch outside the nearby restaurant, a group of young activists is locked in political discussion in the sweltering midday heat.

An American fighting for a hardline Islamist group carried out a deadly suicide bombing, U.S. officials said Friday, in the first such case in the war.

The confirmation came amid growing fears over the flood of foreigners into Syria, with no end in sight in the three-year war that has already left 162,000 people dead.

Hillary Clinton has given her most detailed account yet of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, but said she will not join the "political slugfest" over the tragedy.

In excerpts from her forthcoming memoir "Hard Choices," Clinton offered a blunt rebuttal to Republican lawmakers who have repeatedly accused her of bungling the response to the September 11, 2012 attack on the US mission and of misleading the American public.

Thousands rallied Friday in Libya's two main cities to a rogue general who has been pressing an offensive against jihadist militias in the east of the country for two weeks.

The crowds chanted slogans criticizing new Prime Minister Ahmed Miitig, whose cabinet is already mired in a political standoff with its predecessor.

The United States confirmed Friday that it believes a U.S. citizen carried out a suicide bombing within Syria, as had been claimed by hardline Islamist rebels.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki did not provide any details about the suspect, who had been identified in a New York Times report as a man in his 20s from Florida and of Middle Eastern descent.

Israeli soldiers foiled a suicide attack Friday, arresting a Palestinian in the West Bank who had a dozen pipe bombs hidden under his coat, the army spokesperson said.

The soldiers arrested the man as he approached an army checkpoint "wearing a suspiciously large coat" in the sweltering heat, and found 12 pipe bombs strapped to his body.

Pope Francis warned Friday that the millions of people affected by the Syria crisis risk being forgotten because of the "globalization of indifference" toward the conflict.

The international community risks "forgetting the daily victims, the unspeakable suffering, the thousands of refugees, including the elderly and children, who suffer and sometimes die from hunger and disease caused by the war," he said.

Nearly half of Yemen's population is going hungry, the U.N.'s food agency warned Friday, saying it was scaling up its aid to the impoverished country.

More than 10 million of Yemen's some 25 million inhabitants are either severely food insecure -- meaning they require food assistance because they cannot find enough food for themselves -- or teetering on the edge, the World Food Program said.