Coalition kills IS leader linked to beheading of American aid worker

The US-led coalition against the Islamic State group said Monday it killed a senior jihadist involved in the executions of an American aid worker and other Western hostages.

Abu al-Umarayn was accused of involvement in the November 2014 beheading of Peter Kassig, a former US ranger who was doing volunteer humanitarian work when captured in 2013.

"He was killed and more information will be available after a full assessment," Sean Ryan, spokesman for the US-led coalition, said in a statement issued after the Sunday strikes.

"Al Umarayn had given indications of posing an imminent threat to coalition forces and he was involved in the killing of American citizen and former US Army Ranger, Peter Kassig," he said.

Ryan said the jihadist had also been involved in the execution of several other prisoners.

It is the first time the coalition, which has been hunting down IS fighters in Iraq and Syria since 2014, has announced the killing of a jihadist leader linked to Kassig's death.

At the time of the execution, IS released a video showing Kassig's severed head but did not publish footage of the decapitation, as it had done for other hostages.

The Syrian regime's official Sana news agency had earlier Sunday accused the US-led coalition of firing on Syrian army positions in remote eastern regions.

Regime targeted?

"The American coalition forces launched around 8:00 pm (1800 GMT) this evening several missiles against some positions of our forces in the Ghorab mountains south of Sukhna," it said.

Quoting a military source, it said the bombardment had caused only material damage.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said coalition forces fired "more than 14 missiles" at a Syrian army convoy as it was passing through the desert.

"The group was lost in the middle of the desert around 35 kilometres from the Al-Tanf base", the Observatory's director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

The United States often uses this base to launch its strikes against IS jihadists.

Coalition spokesman Sean Ryan denied any strikes targeted the Syrian army.

"False, the strikes were as the report stated and directed at ISIS," he said, using another acronym for the hardline militant group.

Kassig founded a humanitarian organisation in 2012 that trained some 150 civilians to provide medical aid to people in Syria. His group also gave food, cooking supplies, clothing and medicine to the needy.

He took the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam.

His execution was part of a gruesome series of Western hostage beheadings that IS filmed and published to shock the world as it attempted to expand across the region.

After expanding to control a self-styled "caliphate" straddling Syria and Iraq which was larger than Britain, IS suffered a string of military setbacks.

It has virtually no fixed positions left in Iraq and is now defending a few pockets in desert areas o Syria, including the region where Sunday's strikes were carried out.

The other is the jihadists' main active front in the Hajin area of Deir az-Zour province, where coalition-backed Kurdish-led fighters have been struggling to flush out a group of die-hard jihadists making a fierce last stand.

The coalition as well as the Syrian government and its Russian backers have all repeatedly vowed to carry on the fight until achieving a full victory over IS.

But analysts have warned that fully eradicating the jihadists from those desert hideouts where the state has a very limited footprint could prove almost impossible.

Follow us on Twitter: @The_NewArab