Saudi Arabia has asked Pakistan to contribute aircraft, ships and ground troops to its coalition fighting rebels in Yemen, the Pakistani defense minister said Monday.

Khawaja Asif spoke at the start of a special parliamentary debate on whether to join the Saudi-led military intervention against Shiite Huthi rebels trying to overthrow President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to visit Iran on Tuesday despite a war of words between the neighboring countries over conflicts from Syria to Yemen, Tehran confirmed.

There had been calls from Iranian conservatives for the visit to be cancelled after Erodgan accused Shiite Tehran of backing "terrorist" rebels in the face of an air campaign in Yemen led by its Sunni arch rival Riyadh.

Turkey will at the weekend deport nine British citizens detained on the Syrian border after they tried to cross into areas controlled by Islamic State (IS) jihadists, reports said Friday.

The Turkish authorities have completed their investigation into the nine, whose case has attracted huge attention in Britain after it emerged that they included four children and the son of a British local politician, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Turkey on Friday summoned Tunisia's ambassador to explain remarks made by the Tunisian foreign minister accusing Ankara of facilitating the transit of jihadist fighters bound for neighboring Syria and Iraq, a Turkish official said.

"The foreign ministry sought an explanation for the remarks made by the Tunisian foreign minister," the official told AFP.

Turkey said Friday it will send and "informal mission" to Crimea to monitor what it termed the "oppression" of Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group that opposed Russia's 2014 seizure of the Black Sea peninsula.

"We are sending an informal mission to observe the human rights violations in Crimea soon," Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Lithuania.

Chairman of the Board of Directors and General Manager of Bank Audi Raymond Audi strongly slammed media reports claiming that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is using the bank's branches abroad to channel funds in favor of the organization.

“Reports published in al-Akhbar daily on Thursday and attributed to American and Lebanese banking sources involved in a meeting between U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser and the Board of Directors of the Association of Banks in Lebanon, are completely unfounded,” said Audi in a clarification letter to al-Akhbar newspaper.

Washington is planning to increase the number of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle in the United States, mostly for vulnerable cases, a U.S. official said Thursday.

Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard said the numbers will still be very small compared with the nearly 4 million Syrians who have become refugees in neighboring countries, mostly Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

Turkish police on Thursday launched early morning raids against suspected members of an ultra-leftist group in Istanbul, after two deadly shootouts blamed on the militants that sent a wave of fear through the city.

At least 24 people were arrested in the raids in the Okmeydani district of Istanbul as dozens of police deployed in armored vehicles in the area, Turkish media said.

Turkish security forces Wednesday shot dead a female assailant armed with bombs and a gun after she and an accomplice sought to attack the police headquarters in Istanbul, reports said.

The male accomplice was injured but fled the scene of the clash, which came a day after a top prosecutor was killed in a hostage drama, Istanbul governor Vasip Sahin was quoted as saying by Turkish media.

Turkey has arrested nine British nationals on the Syrian border as they sought to illegally cross over from Turkey, the army said on Thursday.

"Nine people of British nationality were arrested on the border trying to enter Syria from Turkey," the army said in a statement on its website, adding that the arrests took place in the Hatay region of southern Turkey.