Life in the Syrian city of Hasakeh, divided between allied Kurdish and regime forces, comes at a price: two lots of military service and double the taxes.

Raed, a Syrian Arab living in the northeastern city, avoids passing through checkpoints run by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).

The 20-year-old law student says he has had enough of fruitless protests in support of Egypt's deposed Islamist president, two years of a losing struggle with police.

Now he wants to join the extremists of the Islamic State group who are battling the army in the Sinai Peninsula.

After billions of dollars spent and more than 10,000 extremist fighters killed, the Islamic State group is fundamentally no weaker than it was when the U.S.-led bombing campaign began a year ago, American intelligence agencies have concluded.

The military campaign has prevented Iraq's collapse and put the Islamic State under increasing pressure in northern Syria, particularly squeezing its self-proclaimed capital in Raqqa. But intelligence analysts see the overall situation as a strategic stalemate: The Islamic State remains a well-funded extremist army able to replenish its ranks with foreign jihadis as quickly as the U.S. can eliminate them. Meanwhile, the group has expanded to other countries, including Libya, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Afghanistan.

Pointing to a crater left by one of scores of Turkish air strikes in Iraq's Kurdistan region, a PKK rebel official said that "Turkey has declared war against us".

For three decades, Turkey was at war with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which was seeking an independent state in southeastern Anatolia.

Mullah Omar's death poses an existential crisis for the Afghan Taliban, analysts say, potentially presaging a splintering of the movement as the Islamic State group gains a toehold among insurgents enthralled by its battlefield prowess.

The group has suffered a string of recent defections to IS, with some insurgents voicing disaffection with the "ghost leader", who hasn't been seen in public since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion toppled the Afghan Taliban from power.

Turkey's allies know it is playing a double game with its twin onslaught against Kurdish rebels and the Islamic State group, but are turning a blind eye to keep NATO's only Muslim member on side, analysts said.

The very public show of solidarity for Turkey's fight against "terrorism" at an emergency NATO meeting on Tuesday hid the discomfort some allies feel about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's strategy.

Taliban chief Mullah Omar has cast a long shadow over Afghanistan ever since he led a young band of zealots to power almost two decades ago, imposing brutal Islamist rule over the country.

The current Kabul government is investigating reports of his death, a presidential spokesman said Wednesday, amid frenzied speculation about the rumored demise of the reclusive warrior-cleric.

Thousands of migrants are trying to cross the Channel from France in search of a better life in Britain -- but what makes them risk their lives traveling from one wealthy European country to another?

The answer is partly down to the allure of living in a country where many of them speak the language, English, and where they might have family or cultural connections, experts say.

Critics of the Iran nuclear deal claim it is flawed, among many reasons, because it does not demand that Tehran also change its behavior at home and abroad. That complaint ignores the United States' long history of striking arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, a far more dangerous enemy.

Those deals probably made the world a safer place through some of the darkest days of the Cold War, and they proved talks could be productive even with a sworn adversary.

A landmark deal on Iran's nuclear program has breathed new life into plans for a gas pipeline through Pakistan -- and sparked a geopolitical tussle, with Russia looking to expand its influence, observers say.

With sanctions on Iran likely to ease and peace talks between the Taliban and Afghan government getting under way, wrangling is intensifying over the proposed pipelines, which would link Central Asia to the Middle East.