Air strikes on a holdout of the Islamic State group in Syria near the Iraqi border have killed 18 jihadists, including a senior Iraqi commander, a monitor said Friday.

Those killed late Thursday in the village of Sousa in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor were mostly foreigners, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Britain-based monitor, which relies on sources inside Syria for its information, was unable to say if the strikes were carried out by a US-led coalition fighting IS or Iraq.

The Iraqi army said it had targeted an IS "operations room" inside Syria late Thursday, killing "a number of IS elements", but did not mention a precise location.

It was not immediately clear whether the Iraqi army and the Observatory were referring to the same incident.

IS overran large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a "caliphate" in land it controlled.

But the jihadist group has since lost most of it to various offensives in both countries. In Syria, its presence has been reduced to pockets in Deir Ezzor and parts of the vast Badia desert.

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Israel clears soldiers in 2014 'Black Friday' Gaza assault
Jerusalem (AFP) Aug 15, 2018
Israel's military on Wednesday closed its probe into a deadly 2014 assault in Gaza that followed the capture of a soldier despite a rights group's charge of possible war crimes. A military fact-finding mission into the "Black Friday" assault in which Amnesty says more than 130 Palestinian civilians died during the 2014 Gaza war showed that a criminal investigation was "not warranted", the army said in a statement. It acknowledged, however, that up to 70 civilians were "unintentionally killed as ... read more