Conflicts and instability are hampering the fight against hunger in the Middle East at a time when undernourishment is on the rise, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization warned Wednesday.

Presenting a report on the Near East and North Africa region's progress on Millennium Development Goals set in 1990, FAO said MENA was the only region of the world in which hunger had increased.

More than 10,000 jihadists have been killed in air strikes against the Islamic State group over a nine-month coalition campaign, U.S. deputy secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Wednesday.

"We have seen enormous losses from Daesh (IS), more than 10,000 since the beginning of the campaign and this will end up having an impact," Blinken told French radio, without specifying whether the losses were in Iraq or Syria.

Human Rights Watch accused Jordan on Wednesday of leaving hundreds of Syrian refugees stranded in the desert along its border with little access to aid after closing informal frontier crossings.

"Jordanian authorities have severely restricted" the movement since March of refugees fleeing the war in Syria, the watchdog said in a statement.

At least 37 people, including 10 children, were killed in government barrel bomb attacks in northern Syria on Wednesday, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the deaths came in three incidents, in Aleppo province in the north and Idlib province in the northwest.

The seat of the Maronite church announced on Wednesday that Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi will not hold talks with Syrian officials during his visit to Damascus next week.

Bkirki's press officer Walid Ghayyad said the June 8 trip is “pastoral and will not include any political meetings.”

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday that 110 jihadists who left French territory to fight with the Islamic State group had died in Iraq and Syria.

"More than 860 individuals have spent time in these countries, 471 of which are still there and 110 of which are dead," Valls told the Senate as it studies an intelligence bill approved by lawmakers in May.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday filed a criminal complaint against a top daily newspaper and its editor for publishing images allegedly showing trucks belonging to the state intelligence service helping send weapons to rebels in Syria. 

Erdogan has accused the opposition daily Cumhuriyet and its editor-in-chief Can Dundar of "publishing images and information contrary to the truth" and "obtaining and disseminating secret information," the official Anatolia news agency reported. 

Tajikistan on Tuesday replaced its former special forces head who claims he skipped the country to fight for the Islamic State group and is now on Interpol's wanted list.

The Central Asian country is reeling from the shock defection of 40-year-old Colonel Gulmorod Halimov, which was revealed in an apparent IS propaganda video last week.

The Islamic State jihadist group has claimed a suicide attack on an Iraqi police base north of Baghdad that killed at least 37 people.

A Somali man detonated an explosives-rigged armoured vehicle inside the base, while a Tajik and a Syrian blew up a Humvee and a truck in the area, IS said in an online statement.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani accused Arab and Western governments of miscalculating in their backing for Syrian rebels as the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group gathered in Paris Tuesday.

Speaking at a reception for Syria's visiting parliament speaker Jihad al-Lahham, Rouhani renewed Tehran's longstanding accusation that it was those governments' support for armed insurgency against its Damascus ally that had led to the rise of the jihadists.