Qatar's foreign minister headed Sunday for Moscow for talks on Russia's obstruction of a new Iran nuclear deal and on the Ukraine conflict, a source with knowledge of the visit said.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani was to meet Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other top officials on Monday, said the source.

Iran has decided to temporarily suspend its secret Baghdad-brokered talks aimed at defusing yearslong tensions with regional rival Saudi Arabia, Iranian state-linked media reported Sunday, a day after Saudi Arabia carried out its largest known mass execution in its modern history.

The Iranian news website Nournews, considered close to the country's Supreme National Security Council, reported the government had unilaterally paused the talks with Saudi Arabia that have been ongoing in Baghdad over the past year aimed at restoring diplomatic ties.

Iran claimed responsibility for a missile strike Sunday on the northern Iraqi city of Arbil, saying it targeted an Israeli "strategic center."

Authorities in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region had earlier said 12 ballistic missiles rained down on Arbil in a pre-dawn attack targeting U.S. interests that slightly wounded two civilians and caused material damage.

With Russia's war on Ukraine now in its third week, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday approved bringing in volunteer fighters from the Middle East, particularly Syria.

Syria clearly has a rich pool of fighters to draw from. Russia's military is deeply entrenched in the Mideast country, where its intervention - starting in 2015 - helped Syrian President Bashar Assad gain the upper hand in the ongoing, 11-year civil war.

Libya's parliament-appointed prime minister  said Friday that armed groups backing him had withdrawn from positions around Tripoli, after the U.N. warned of a new escalation in the divided country.

An oil refinery in Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, was attacked by drone, causing a small fire that did not cause injuries or affect supplies, the energy ministry said Friday.

The statement did not specify where the drone strike was launched from. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Saudi Arabia has said it had rescued two young American women from Yemen in a joint special operations mission with the United States.

The Saudi defense ministry said the women, both Yemeni-American teenagers, were being held by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa after having been taken captive while visiting their grandmother.

The Kremlin said Friday that fighters from Syria and the Middle East would be allowed to fight for Russia in Ukraine, after President Vladimir Putin backed a plan to send volunteers to battle there.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia's defense minister had said that "most of those who want and who asked (to fight) are citizens of Middle East countries and Syrians".

Israel's parliament has renewed a temporary law dating back to 2003 that bars Israeli citizens from extending citizenship or even residency to Palestinian spouses from the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Israel says the law, which was first enacted during a Palestinian uprising, is needed for security. Critics view it as a racist measure aimed at maintaining the country's Jewish majority. The law is aimed at Palestinians and does not apply to Jewish settlers in the West Bank as they already have Israeli citizenship.

Besieging cities, shelling civilian infrastructure and arranging "safe corridors": the tactics used by Russia in its war on Ukraine mirror those it tested and fine-tuned to drain resistance in Syria's conflict.

But unlike its Syria play book, the challenge Russia faces from a Western-backed army in Ukraine dwarfs that of Syrian rebels who lacked military might or broad international backing, analysts said.