Middle East updates / Two U.S. soldiers killed by Taliban bomb near Kabul

'160,000 Christians have fled ISIS-held Iraqi city of Mosul'; Obama thanks Saudi Arabia for help against Islamic State; Afghan police say Supreme Court official shot dead.

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7:40 P.M. Egypt refers 439 suspects to military tribunals

An Egyptian security official says the country's top prosecutor has referred more than 400 suspected Islamists to military tribunals for acts of violence and killings of policemen.

The official says that among the men it describes as Islamists were 300 from the southern province of Minya and 139 from the Nile Delta province of Beheira. The case involves last year's wave of violence that came in retaliation to a bloody police dispersal of an Islamist sit-in.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

In October, Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi ordered the military to join forces with police in guarding vital institutions. The decree stipulated that perpetrators of any attacks against state facilities will be tried in front of military tribunals. (AP)

5:41 P.M. Two U.S. soldiers killed by Taliban bomb near Kabul

A Taliban bomb killed two American soldiers in a NATO convoy late on Friday night near the U.S. Bagram Airfield base north of Kabul, a U.S. defence official said on Saturday.

"Two International Security Assistance Force service members died as a result of an enemy forces attack in eastern Afghanistan on Dec. 12, 2014," a coalition press release said on Saturday.

The coalition, as per its policy, declined to give the soldiers' nationality but a U.S. defence official in Washington confirmed the two were American.

The bomb was the latest in a spate of deadly attacks in and around the Afghan capital as international forces leave the country. (Reuters)

4:08 P.M. Egypt denies entry to prominent American scholar

Airport officials say Egypt has denied entry to a prominent American scholar arriving at Cairo's international airport, the latest incident in the country's sweeping crackdown on dissent.

Michele Dunne, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. diplomat, had accepted an invitation to speak at a conference organized by the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, made up primarily of former Egyptian diplomats.

In her work, Dunne is frequently critical of the Egyptian government.

Last August Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth and regional director Sarah Leah Whitson were also denied entry to Egypt ahead of the publication of a report accusing the government of possible crimes against humanity. Over 20,000 people have been arrested since Islamist President Mohammed Mursi's ouster last year. (AP)

2:46 P.M. Militias battle in central Libya near oil terminal

Islamist-allied militias from the western city of Misrata clashed with an eastern militia that holds a major oil terminal on Saturday, in violence that killed at least two people, Libyan officials said.

The officials say the Tripoli-based government — backed by Misrata militias and Islamist factions — ordered its forces to "liberate" the Sidra terminal. That terminal is held by the militia of eastern separatist Ibrahim Jedran. Jedran's forces are known to be loyal to Libya's elected government based in the eastern city of Tobruk.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists.

Saturday's fighting is the first confrontation near Libya's vital oil terminals. It highlights the stakes of the ongoing chaos in Libya, where rival governments, parliaments and militias fight for power. (AP)

2:26 P.M. Iran extends visas for 450,000 Afghan refugees

Iran said it had agreed to extend temporary visas for 450,000 Afghan refugees for six months, lifting a threat to send them back home to a country facing attacks by resurgent militants.

Afghanistan - struggling to cope with hundreds of thousands of people left homeless inside its own borders by a wave of violence -- this month asked its neighbor not to expel the Afghan refugees who did not have the right documents.

Kabul said 760,000 refugees were at risk and it was not immediately clear what would happen to those who did not receive extensions.

"(Temporary visas) have been extended for six months based on the brotherly relations between our two countries," Iran's foreign ministry said in a statement released late on Friday.

Afghanistan had agreed to come up with a plan on how to help the refugees within two months, the ministry added. (Reuters)  

11:00 A.M. ISIS beheads four men for blasphemy in Syria

Islamic State's policing force in western Syria decapitated four men after accusing them of blasphemy, a rights group monitoring the Syrian conflict said on Saturday, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Observatory, which monitors the conflict using sources on the ground, reported a similar killing on Tuesday, when Islamic State beheaded a man in a town square in the north of the country. (Reuters)

10:30 A.M. 160,000 Christians have fled militant-held Iraqi city, lawmaker says 

At least 160,000 Christians have been forced to flee Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, since Islamic State militants seized the city in June, a Christian lawmaker said on Saturday.

"Christian families have been displaced from the city because of violence and death threats from this terrorist group," member of parliament Emad Yukhana told independent Iraqi news site Almada Press.

After the capture of Mosul as part of its incursion into northern Iraq, Islamic State ordered local Christians to convert to Islam, pay a protection tax, or face death.

Yukhana said few European countries, which he did not name, had taken in some of Iraq's displaced Christians. "The majority of Christians have taken shelter in Kurdistan," he added, referring to Iraq's northern autonomous Kurdish region.

In August, the United States started an aerial campaign against Islamic State in Iraq after the al-Qaeda splinter group came close to Kurdistan's capital city Erbil.

Other countries later joined the campaign against Islamic State that also controls considerable swathes of territory in western Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

There were about 1.2 million Christians in Iraq before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country, which overthrew longtime dictator Saddam Hussein, according to Iraqi clerics.

That figure has since dwindled to about 500,000. (DPA)

9:10 A.M. India police hunt man said to be behind pro-ISIS Twitter posts

8:30 A.M. Afghan police say Supreme Court official shot dead

Separate insurgent attacks killed two U.S. troops and a top Afghan court official, authorities said Saturday, part of a surging wave of militant assaults ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign troops at the end of the month.

Security in the capital, Kabul, has been stepped up as the Taliban have warned that attacks on the government, foreigners, and the media will continue.

Late Friday, a militant attack targeting a military convoy killed two U.S. soldiers by the Bagram air base in Parwan province near Kabul, an international military official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as the information wasn't authorized for release.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force said in a statement that two service members "died as a result of an enemy forces attack in eastern Afghanistan." NATO does not identify the nationalities of the dead, relying instead on their home countries.

The deaths on Saturday were the first foreign troops killed this month, bringing to 65 the total number of international troops killed in the country this year, 50 of them Americans.

Early Saturday, gunmen shot dead Atiqullah Rawoofi, the head of the court's secretariat in Kabul's northwestern suburbs, said Farid Afzali, chief of the Kabul police criminal investigation unit. A colleague of Rawoofi, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said two men on a motorbike shot Rawoofi as he was walking from his home to his car.

The Taliban claimed both attacks in text messages to journalists.

Rawoofi's slaying follows the Taliban suicide attack Thursday on a French school that killed a German citizen and wounded others during a play condemning the violence. In the past month, five foreigners, including a British embassy security guard and a South African charity worker and his two teenage children, have died in insurgent attacks in Kabul.

NATO's combat mission ends Dec. 31, 13 years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks sparked the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. The alliance will leave some 13,000 troops in Afghanistan from Jan. 1, mainly in a training and support role.

Afghanistan's civil society activists take part in a demonstration to protest against Thursday's suicide attack by the Taliban at the French Cultural Centre at a high school in Kabul. Dec. 12, 2014.(AP)

1:00 A.M. Obama thanks Saudi Arabia for help against Islamic State

U.S. President Barack Obama praised Saudi Arabia for its contribution to fighting terrorism by Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

In a meeting with Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdalaziz Al Saud, Obama "noted the importance of working together to undermine and delegitimize ISIS's extremist ideology," the White House said.

The men also discussed cooperation against Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. (DPA)

12:15 A.M. ISIS throws man accused of being gay off building in Iraq