American forces killed a senior member of the Islamic State (ISIS) jihadist group on Thursday in a pre-dawn raid on northeastern Syria, the US military's Central Command said, according to a report in AFP.
"Centcom forces conducted a raid in northeast Syria targeting a senior ISIS official," spokesman Colonel Joe Buccino said in an emailed statement to AFP.
Centcom later said on Twitter that the raid had targeted "Rakkan Wahid al-Shammari, an ISIS official known to facilitate the smuggling of weapons and fighters".
Shammari "was killed and one of his associates was wounded," it said, adding that two others were detained and that the raid did not result in further casualties.
Syria's state broadcaster had earlier said a US operation involving multiple helicopters left one person dead and saw several others captured in a government-controlled area of northeastern Syria, which is mostly dominated by Kurdish forces.
The targeted village, Muluk Saray, is located 17 kilometers (10 miles) south of the Kurdish-held city of Qamishli and is controlled by pro-regime militias, the Britainbased Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Thursday's raid was the first such airborne operation in government-held territory since the Syria conflict erupted in 2011, the Observatory added.
ISIS overran large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a "caliphate" in land it controlled.
Several military offensives, including those backed by the US-led international coalition, have since seen ISIS lose most areas it once controlled, including the loss of their de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria.
Despite losing the physical caliphate, thousands of ISIS fighters remain in Iraq and Syria, and the group continues to carry out terrorist attacks.
In July, the Pentagon said it killed Syria's top ISIS jihadist, Maher al-Agal, in a drone strike in the northern part of the country.
In February, US President Joe Biden announced that ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim Al-Hashemi Al-Quraishi died in a US special forces raid in northern Syria, when he detonated a bomb that killed him and family members.
In 2019, the ISIS terrorist organization's first leader and founder, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in another US raid.