Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, the deputy to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, has reportedly been killed in a drone strike in Syria. Picture: CNN/screengrab.

Not-for-profit international policy organisation The Counter Extremist Project said Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, the deputy to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, was reportedly killed in a drone strike in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told DPA the drone carried out the strike near a military base in al Mastoume.

Al-Masri, the son-in-law of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, had been a member of the global terror group for three decades.

He was also implicated in the bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 that killed 200 people, the CEP reveal.

The air strikes, which killed 11 people on Monday, is the latest spasm of violence to mar UN-brokered talks in Geneva between the government and the opposition.

The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist groups, said news of the death of al Masri, also known as Abdullah Muhammad Rajab Abdulrahman, was also circulating on jihadi social media accounts.

Images of the vehicle purported to have been carrying al-Masri, showed damage to the passenger compartment of the beige Kia sedan but no damage to the engine block. The roof was blown open on the right side of the vehicle.

There was no immediate comment or confirmation from the Pentagon surrounding the death.

Al-Masri was once the chairman of al-Qaeda’s management council, according to a Washington Post report citing leaked US intelligence documents dating back to 2008.

Iranian authorities are believed to have jailed him following the 9/11 attacks before releasing him in a prisoner exchange with al-Qaeda in Yemen in 2015.

A senior official in a rival jihadi faction in northern Syria urged caution over the reports, saying other top al-Qaeda officials in Syria had staged their own deaths only to defect from the group.

TERROR FIGHT

Meanwhile, pro-government forces have driven Islamic State militants out of a line of villages in the congested Turkish frontier region, blocking the path of rival Turkish-backed opposition forces from reaching the de facto IS capital, Raqqa.

The northwestern province falls largely under the control of an al-Qaeda-linked rebel coalition. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by fighting are living as refugees there.

Government forces and allied Hezbollah fighters meanwhile cut an arc through Islamic State-held territory to reach independent, Kurdish-led forces near the Euphrates River, effectively preventing Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces from heading south toward Raqqa.

The opposition forces, which seized al-Bab from the Islamic State group last week, will now have to confront government forces or the rival Kurdish forces if they desire to reach Raqqa, which is further southwest along the Euphrates River.

Those forces are accompanied by a deployment of Turkish troops, tanks and artillery inside Syrian territory. Turkey says the nearby Kurdish-led forces are terrorists.

The opposition accused the government of setting up a buffer zone between opposition fighters and IS.

— with staff writers