Human Rights Watch warned Sunday of the use of cluster bombs over the past four months in the Libyan conflict between forces of the North African country's rival governments.

"There is credible evidence of the use of banned cluster bombs in at least two locations in Libya since December 2014," HRW said in a statement released in Beirut.

More than 215,000 people have been killed in Syria in four years of conflict, a monitoring group said on Sunday as the brutal civil war entered its fifth year.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented the deaths of 215,518 people in Syria since March 2011, among them more than 66,000 civilians.

The Vatican's ambassador to the United Nations has endorsed military action against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria -- an unusual move because the Vatican traditionally has opposed force in the region.

In an interview with the U.S. Catholic website Crux, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said IS fighters were committing atrocities on a huge scale and the world needed to intervene.

Eleven people were killed and 25 injured when a long-distance bus collided with a lorry on Algeria's Trans-Sahara Highway, emergency services said.

The accident happened near the oasis town of In Salah, around 1,500 kilometers (950 miles) south of the capital Algiers.

An agent who helped three British schoolgirls cross into Syria to join the Islamic State group was also working as a courier to transfer money to jihadists, a Turkish newspaper reported on Sunday.

Turkey announced Thursday that it had arrested an intelligence agent working as a spy for an unidentified country in the U.S.-led coalition and said he was a Syrian national.

Two days before Israel's election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a last-ditch effort Sunday to garner support by appealing to the center and heading for a mass rally in Tel Aviv.

Israel goes to the polls on Tuesday for the second general election in as many years with pundits unanimous that it is turning out to be a referendum on Netanyahu's six years as premier.

Iraqi commanders were plotting a strategy for flushing out the few remaining Islamic State group jihadists from central Tikrit, a city one commander said Saturday would be liberated within three days.

The massively outnumbered IS fighters are completely boxed in but protected by snipers and thousands of bombs they planted across the city.

Syria's conflict enters its fifth year on Sunday with the regime emboldened by shifting international attention and a growing humanitarian crisis exacerbated by the rise of the Islamic State group.

More than 210,000 people have been killed and half of the country's population displaced, prompting rights groups to accuse the international community of "failing Syria".

The U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia said it had suspended consular services in the kingdom for two days due to "heightened security concerns", after warning of threats against Western oil workers.

All services in Riyadh and at the consulates in Jeddah and Dhahran have been canceled for Sunday and Monday, it said in a statement posted on its website Saturday.

A small bomb killed a street cleaner in the Egyptian capital Cairo late Saturday, a security official said.

The blast occurred near a tram track in the working class neighborhood of Mattariya, a stronghold of supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.