A man who US officials called the leader of the Islamic State militant group in Syria was killed Tuesday in a drone strike while riding a motorcycle in the northern part of the country, the Pentagon and local organizations said. Maher al-Agal was killed near Jindires in northern Syria, and one of his top aides was seriously injured in the attack, Pentagon Central Command spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Dave Eastburn told AFP. The volunteer Syrian Civil Defense Force, known as the "White Helmets," said the attack targeted the two while they were on a motorcycle outside Aleppo. President Joe Biden said the strike "takes a key terrorist off the field and significantly degrades the ability of ISIS to plan, resource, and conduct their operations in the region." The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed Agal's death and said he was the Islamic State governor for the Levant region.

PARIS (AP) -- The leader of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara died of wounds from a drone strike that hit him on a motorcycle last month in southern Mali, in a French-led operation involving backup from U.S., EU, Malian and Nigerien military forces, French authorities said Thursday. The French government did not disclose how they identified him as Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, whose group has terrorized the region. The claim could not immediately be independently verified. France declared the killing a major victory against jihadists in Africa and justification for years of anti-extremist efforts in the Sahel. French government officials described al-Sahrawi as "enemy No. 1" in the region, and accused him of ordering or overseeing attacks on U.S. troops, French aid workers and some 2,000-3,000 African civilians – most of them Muslim.

U .S. military officers watched grainy video feeds at a small operations center in Baghdad on Tuesday as Predator drones tracked and killed three reputed Islamic State leaders -- one after another -- in the offensive on Mosul. The targeted air strikes were due in large part to intelligence extracted from cellphones, computer hard drives, memory cards and hand-written ledgers recovered from battlefields and towns taken from Islamic State fighters. Recently captured intelligence also has proved useful in providing clues to detecting potential terrorist plots, tracking foreign fighters and identifying Islamic State supporters around the globe, U.S. officials said. The largest data trove was recovered when U.S.-backed Syrian rebel forces recaptured Manbij, an Islamic State stronghold in northern Syria, in mid-August. Intelligence agencies recovered more than 120,000 documents, nearly 1,200 devices and more than 20 terabytes of digital information, officials said. Islamic State militants came early in the morning, riding atop trucks that lumbered into this northern Iraqi oil town.

U.S. drone operators had been stalking the baby-faced British terrorist for days with infrared cameras and other sensors before the order came to kill him. As night fell on April 25, a U.S. warplane dropped a guided-bomb that obliterated the SUV occupied by 23-year-old Raphael Saihou Hostey near Mosul, Islamic State's stronghold in Iraq. Hostey, a recruiter for the militants, was targeted by a U.S. military campaign that has singled out and killed more than 120 Islamic State leaders, commanders, propagandists, recruiters and other so-called high-value individuals so far this year, officials said. The leadership attacks have picked up recently due to intelligence collected by special operations teams on night raids, from captured militants, and from intercepts of emails, cellphones and other communications. The focus on Islamic State's command and control structure, including its recruitment and funding systems, has helped weaken the Sunni extremist group as Iraqi, Syrian and Kurdish forces press the militants on the battlefield.