Turkey and Russia have agreed to begin joint patrols along a key highway in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib as part of a recent ceasefire agreement between the two sides, Turkey’s defense minister says.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry has summoned the US and British ambassadors to Baghdad over a string of airstrikes carried out by the United States against multiple locations of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), better known by the Arabic name Hashd al-Sha’abi.

Tensions between the U.S. and China may re-escalate after officials of both countries hurled verbal attacks at each other about the origin of the coronavirus, observers say.