Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this article misstated how many civilian deaths the coalition has acknowledged. The correct number it has admitted to is 21.

Al Gharra is a mud-brick village built on hard, flat Syrian desert and populated by the descendants of Bedouin. It is a desolate place. Everything is dun colored: the bare, single-story houses and the stony desert they stand on. There is not much farming — it is too dry — just a few patches of cotton and tobacco.

Before the war, villagers got a little money from the government to look after the national park on Mount Abdul-Aziz, a barren rock that rises 3,000 feet behind the village and stretches miles into the distance. Mount Abdul-Aziz is named after a lieutenant of the 12th-Century Muslim warrior Saladin, who built a fort to dominate the plain below. There is a military base there today too, which changes hands according to the fortunes of Syria's civil war. In 2011, the regime of Bashar al-Assad held the base; next it was the rebels of the Free Syrian Army; then the so-called Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS); and finally the Kurds, who advanced and took the mountain last May under the cover of American warplanes.

Abdul-Aziz al Hassan is from al Gharra, his first name the same as the mountain's. He left the village while the Islamic State was in charge, but it is because of a bomb from an American plane that he cannot go back. What happened to his family is the story of just one bomb of the 35,000 dropped so far during 10,000 missions flown in the US-led air war against the Islamic State.

Al Hassan is in his 20s, small, soft-spoken, with chestnut-brown skin. He said the war did not affect al Gharra much back when the regime or the Free Syrian Army occupied the mountain's military base. But he remembers the day that the Islamic State came. "I was sitting in front of the house when a jeep passed by and stopped at the shrine to Saladin's commander," he said. "They gathered all of the people. One said: 'We are the Islamic State. We are here to create an emirate based on Sharia (Islamic law).'" From that day, they decreed, men had to be in the mosque, the women at home. If a woman wanted to go to the market, she had to walk with a husband, brother or son. No one outside the family could see women uncovered, even at home. "It wasn't as if we didn't know what Islam was. But they didn't even like the way we prayed. Everything we did was wrong in their eyes."

Facebook's artificial intelligence chief worked on the development of systems which could one day help computers automatically spy on humans, The Sun Online has learned.

Yann LeCun, leader of Mark Zuckerberg's AI research division, contributed to academic papers exploring the creation of software which would serve as a "key component" in an automated surveillance network.

Computer surveillance is likely to become hugely controversial in the coming years, as it will allow cops, spooks and even private companies to track individual people's movements.

Eventually, CCTV cameras will be able to work out the identity of the people they are looking at - as long as they have pictures of them.

Facebook, of course, has a huge number of images uploaded by users and already uses facial recognition to automatically sort photos based on who's in them and where they were taken.

Up to 22 Somali soldiers may have been killed by a suspected United States military airstrike in what local officials called a ruse orchestrated by rival regional authorities.

Pentagon says US conducted 'self defence' strike v. #AlShabaab in Galkayo #Somalia, killing 9. Galmudug says strike killed 20 of its troops

— Mary Harper (@mary_harper) September 28, 2016

"The attack occurred at our army base, 30km east of this town and killed 22 soldiers, wounded 16 others and destroyed armored vehicles. US drones carried out the attack, but we believe that the Puntland security forces gave [the United States] wrong information," said Galmudug region's state security minister, Osman Issa Nor, as cited by Xinhua.

The alleged American attack, according to Nor, followed a call for help from forces in the northern Somali region of Puntland, arguing shots had been fired at them by Al-Shabaab Islamist guerrillas from the neighboring Galmudug area.

Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis confirmed the US carried out a "self-defense airstrike" after Somali troops were attacked during the take-down of an improvised explosive device production network.

Captain Davis said nine Al-Shabaab fighters had been killed in the mission but that Washington would now investigate other possible victims.

An Italian frigate has participated in joint drills with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, an Iranian commander has said. The maneuvers are unprecedented and come despite several controversial incidents involving US warships in the same area.

The drills took place in the strategic strait, located between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

The Italian frigate Euro sailed to the strait for maneuvers with the Iranian ships the Alvand and Alborz, following a port call in Bandar Abbas on Saturday, Iranian Admiral Hossein Azad told the state IRNA news agency.

An Iranian and an Italian helicopter participated as well, he added, also noting that the drills are aimed at boosting military power and also an exchange of knowledge between the two countries' navies.

In the early 1920s, The Hashemites controlled some of the most important countries in the Middle East including Iraq, Jordan and the Hejaz - the area of what is now Saudi Arabia where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has reached a deal to limit oil production, media reports stated, citing sources in the organization. Production is to be limited to 32.5mn barrels per day, and the deal is expected to come into force in November.

The cartel currently produces 33.24 million barrels per day, which means that if the reports prove true, OPEC countries will cut production by almost 700 thousand barrels. It will be the first reduction in eight years.

One source claims that OPEC will settle production levels for each member country at the next formal meeting, set to be held in Vienna on November 30.

One of the sources also told Reuters that after reaching the target production rate, OPEC will turn to non-OPEC producers for output support. Representatives of the OPEC countries are currently in Algeria attending the International Energy Forum.

The agreement to cut production among the world's largest oil producers could lead to oil supply coming more in line with the demand for the energy source.

Up to 250 people, many of them children, have died from exposure to suspected chemical weapons in Darfur in the past eight months, Amnesty International has reported. The Sudanese government has denied chemical weapons use.

The alleged chemical weapons attacks took place in each of the four areas in the Jebel Marra area in Darfur that experienced major violence in 2016, Amnesty wrote in its report.

"The scale and brutality of these attacks is hard to put into words," Tirana Hassan, Amnesty's director of crisis research, said in a press release on Thursday, reiterating that the use of chemical weapons is a war crime.

According to the human rights group, at least 30 "likely chemical attacks" have taken place in the Jebel Marra area of Darfur since January 2016. The latest of them occurred on September 9, Amnesty says.

Apple may have been paying lip service when it frequently assured its customers of its commitment to privacy, including denying the FBI the ability to hack into an iPhone. Turns out Apple logs the location of iMessage and shares information with police.

For iPhone users, there's a world of difference between a text message sent in a green bubble and another sent in a blue one. Green means that a message is sent through a standard SMS service, but blue signifies that the message has been sent through Apple's end-to-end encrypted messaging network that has been a point of pride for the company's privacy policy.

While the messages are indeed end-to-end encrypted, it may not be as secure as it sounds. The encryption keeps Apple from being able to actually read your messages, but that does not mean these messages aren't leaving a trail that Apple can follow.

Saudi Arabia and its allies could retaliate against US legislation allowing the kingdom to be sued for the 9/11 attacks, including scaling back investment in the US economy or restricting access to important regional air bases, experts claim.

"This should be clear to America and to the rest of the world. When one Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state is targeted unfairly, the others stand around it," Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, a professor of political science at United Arab Emirates University, told Associated Press.

"All the states will stand by Saudi Arabia in every way possible."

On Wednesday, Congress overwhelmingly voted to override President Barack Obama's veto of the bill that would allow Americans to potentially sue Saudi Arabia for 9/11. Lawmakers said their priority was not Saudi Arabia, but victims and families.

The "Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA)" would allow US judges to waive sovereign immunity claims when dealing with acts of terrorism committed on American soil - potentially allowing lawsuits against Saudi Arabia over the 9/11 attacks. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals.

One year after the beginning of Russia's aerial anti-terrorist campaign in Syria, not many would question the efficiency of the country's Aerospace Forces, but at the same time the operation has not resulted in a clear victory yet.

During the campaign, Russia succeeded not only at accomplishing a number of military missions in Syria, inflicting damage on terrorists' infrastructure, creating conditions for a counteroffensive of the Syrian army, but also at strengthening Moscow's international positions.

Despite the fact that Russia's Aerospace Forces had played a crucial role in support of Syria's legitimate government, which is admitted by numerous experts, the final victory over terrorists is an issue of a distant future. At the same time, there is also no progress in political settlement of the crisis: intra-Syria talks have collapsed in April in Geneva when members of the Syrian opposition's High Negotiations Committee (HNC), supported by Saudi Arabia and several western states, walked away from the negotiations citing the failure of the Syrian government to commit to reconciliation process. At the moment it is still not clear if the negotiations are resumed.

The Syrian conflict is accompanied by disputes between the most significant foreign states that have a certain influence on the situation in the region. The recent agreement between Moscow and Washington brought hope that all the contradictions could be ironed out, but September attacks of the US-led coalition against the positions of the Syrian army had almost nullified the efforts aimed at strengthening of cooperation on the Syrian issue.

Moscow admits the fact that the pace of developments is not fully in line with initial plans for the Russian campaign against the militants of the Daesh and Jabhat Fatah al Sham (previously known as al-Nusra Front) terrorists groups, which are outlawed in many countries, including Russia.

"When we launched the operation and our Aerospace Forces engaged in anti-terror fight, we expected the operation to last only several months. Today we mark the one-year anniversary [of the campaign] and one can still see no end to it," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said.