(Reuters) - A Twitter account run by an Qaeda member said the leader of the al Qaeda-linked Khorasan group was killed in a U.S. air strike in Syria, SITE monitoring service said on Sunday, following several days of uncertainty over whether he survived the raid.

A U.S. official on Sept. 24 said the United States believed Mohsin al-Fadhli, a senior al Qaeda operative, had been killed in a strike a day earlier, but the Pentagon said several hours later that it was still investigating what had happened to him.

In a message posted on Sept. 27, the jihadist offered condolences for the death of Kuwaiti-born Fadhli, otherwise known as Abu Asmaa al-Kuwati or Abu Asmaa al-Jazrawi, following the Sept. 23 air strike, SITE reported.

U.S. officials have described Khorasan as a network of seasoned al Qaeda fighters with battlefield experience mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan that is now working in league with al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front.

Khorasan is a term for an area including parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where al Qaeda’s main council is believed to be in hiding.

After the Sept. 23 strikes, U.S. officials said they were was still assessing how badly Khorasan had been hit. Islamist militants on social media have said there were unconfirmed reports that the 33-year-old Fadhli had been killed.

SITE did not name the jihadist who reported Fadhli's death but said he had trained under a close associate of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri and had fought in Khorasan before traveling to Syria.

A 2012 State Department notice offering a $7 million reward for information on Fadhli's whereabouts said he was an al Qaeda financier close to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and among the few who knew in advance about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

(AP) — Britain, Belgium and Denmark on Friday joined the U.S.-led coalition of nations that are launching airstrikes on Islamic State group in Iraq, committing warplanes to the struggle against the extremists.

The European lawmakers flatly described the moves as critical to security on home soil, arguing that facing down terrorists has become a matter of urgency. British Prime Minister David Cameron made a passionate plea for action in drastic terms — noting that the militants had beheaded their victims, gouged out eyes and carried out crucifixions to promote goals "from the Dark Ages."

"This is about psychopathic terrorists that are trying to kill us and we do have to realize that, whether we like it or not, they have already declared war on us," he said. "There isn't a 'walk on by' option. There isn't an option of just hoping this will go away."

Cameron told a tense House of Commons during more than six hours of debate that the hallmarks of the campaign would be "patience and persistence, not shock and awe" — a reference to the phrase associated with the invasion of Iraq.

That unpopular intervention has cast a shadow over the discussions because critics fear that Europe will be drawn into a wider conflict, specifically taking on the Islamic group's fighters in Syria.

British lawmakers voted 524-43 for action after being urgently recalled from a recess. Belgian also overwhelmingly approved, voting 114-2 to take part, despite widespread concerns that more terrorism may follow in their homeland as a result.

In May, Belgium was shaken when a gunman opened fire at a Jewish museum in Brussels, killing four people. The suspect, French citizen Mehdi Nemouche, has been identified as a returning Islamic fighter from Syria, and leaders in Belgium and other European countries have expressed their fears that other returnees from Syria and Iraq may cause further havoc.

"We must fight against torture, against decapitations, so it's time to act," said Belgian lawmaker Veli Yuksel, a Flemish Christian Democrat

Denmark pledged seven F-16 fighter jets. Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said her government would send four operational planes and three reserve jets along with 250 pilots and support staff for 12 months. Lawmakers in Denmark must also approve, but that is considered a formality.

"No one should be ducking in this case" she said. "Everyone should contribute."

Britain is expected to deploy Tornado GR4 aircraft, a handful of which are in Cyprus, within striking distance of northern Iraq.

The Tornados give the coalition an enhanced ability to hit moving targets with the use of the Dual Mode Brimstone missile, said Ben Goodlad from IHS Jane's. He said the weapons have a particular ability to hit convoys and fleeing targets.

The British resolution does not address any action in Syria, though many lawmakers tried to push the government to admit that this is the likely next step.

Cameron has justified action in Iraq as lawful because the Iraqi leadership has asked for help.

No European nation has yet agreed to join the U.S. and some Arab states in strikes in Syria.

The motion before Britain's Parliament set no time limit, and that caused unease. Many lawmakers suggested the fight could stretch for years.

"ISIL is a death cult, it's a gang of terrorist murderers. It's not an army and it's certainly not an army that's going to be destroyed by aerial bombardment," said legislator George Galloway, using a former name for the radicals.

Cameron ensured his success by keeping the motion narrowly tailored — staving off the defeat suffered a year ago when Parliament shot down the idea of intervening in Syria to thwart Assad's use of chemical weapons.

Defense Secretary Michael Fallon later indicated that the government might later ask Parliament for support for Syrian airstrikes.

"ISIL is based in Syria, that's where its headquarters are, that's where its resources, its people are. To deal with ISIL you do have to deal and defeat them in both Iraq and in Syria," he told BBC. "We are taking this in a calm, measured way, step-by-step, but it is clear to us that obviously ISIL, in the end, has to be tackled on a broader front."

(Reuters) - Islamic State fighters tightened their siege of a town on Syria's border with Turkey on Friday despite U.S.-led air strikes aimed at defeating the militants in both Syria and Iraq, in a coalition which has now drawn widespread European support.

Washington's closest ally in the wars of the last decade joined the alliance at last on Friday after weeks of weighing its options: Britain's parliament voted 542 to 43 to back Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to join air strikes on Iraq.

Belgium's parliament also voted 114 to 2 on Friday to take part and Denmark said it would send planes. Six Belgian F-16s took off for a staging post in Greece even before the vote.

"This is not a threat on the far side of the world. Left unchecked, we will face a terrorist caliphate on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member, with a declared and proven intention to attack our country and our people," Cameron told British lawmakers.

Until this week France was the only Western country to answer President Barack Obama's call to join the U.S.-led campaign. Since Monday, Australia and the Netherlands have also joined. On Friday Germany expressed support for the mission despite saying it would not send aircraft of its own.

Obama has sought to rally international support for a military coalition against Islamic State, a powerful force in Syria which swept through much of northern Iraq in June, slaughtering prisoners and ordering Shi'ites and non-Muslims to convert or die.

The campaign has brought Washington back to the battlefield in Iraq that it left in 2011 and into Syria for the first time after avoiding involvement during a civil war that began the same year.

The coalition also includes several Arab states, all led by Sunni Muslims alarmed at the rise of Islamic State.

Islamic State has emerged as the most powerful Sunni militant group battling the Shi'ite-backed governments in Iraq and Syria. Its fighters are also battling against rival Sunni rebel groups in Syria and against Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, countries facing complex, multi-sided civil wars in which nearly every state in the Middle East has a stake.

French public support for the mission surged this week after the beheading of a French tourist in Algeria by captors who said it was retaliation for French participation in strikes in Iraq.

Paris said it might also join U.S. strikes in Syria although there was no plan yet to do so. European countries have so far agreed only to strike targets in Iraq, where the government has asked for help, and not in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has not given permission, although he has not objected.

The White House said it was pleased at the British decision and the pace at which the coalition was growing.

"WE'RE AFRAID"

More than a month since Washington began striking Islamic State targets in Iraq, and four days since it extended the campaign into Syria, there are signs fighters are lowering their profile in areas they control to become a harder target.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week's strikes in Syria had disrupted Islamic State's command, control and logistics capabilities.

But the air campaign has yet to halt the group's advance in Syria, where fighters have laid siege to a Kurdish town on the Turkish border, sending 140,000 refugees across the frontier since last week in the fastest exodus of the three-and-a-half-year-old civil war.

Some Kurdish commanders have said the air campaign has given the militants' advance greater impetus by prompting them to move armor out of positions in cities and send it to the front lines, where Western planes have yet to strike.

The main battle in northern Syria has been visible from across the border in Turkey. The boom of artillery and bursts of machinegun fire echoed across the area and at least two shells hit a vineyard on the Turkish side of the border, though there were no immediate reports of casualties inside Turkey.

"We're afraid. We're taking the car and leaving today," said vineyard owner Huseyin Turkmen, 60, as small arms fire rang out in the Syrian hills just to the south.

Islamic State fighters appeared to have taken control of a hill 10 km (6 miles) west of Kobani from where the YPG, the main Kurdish armed group in northern Syria, had been attacking them in recent days.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said Islamic State fighters had also taken control of a village around 7 km (4 miles) east of Kobani.

Kurdish forces said on Thursday they had pushed back the advance on Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, but appealed for U.S.-led air strikes on the insurgents' tanks and heavy weapons.

"The clashes are moving between east, west and south of Kobani ... The three sides are active," Idris Nassan, deputy foreign minister in the area's Kurdish administration, said by phone from the center of the town.

"They are trying hard to reach Kobani. There is resistance here by YPG, by Kobani and some volunteers from north Kurdistan Turkish Kurds," he said. "Every girl, every young man, every man who is able to fight, to carry a gun, they are armed and they are ready to defend and fight."

NATO member Turkey has been conspicuously absent from the coalition against Islamic State, angering its Kurdish residents.

SYRIAN AIR STRIKES

The U.S. military said its planes blew up four Islamic State tanks in eastern Syria and hit a number of targets in Iraq.

The Syrian Observatory monitoring group said one U.S.-led strike in eastern Syria had killed an "important" Islamic State figure on a motorbike. It did not identify the victim.

Assad's Syrian government has not objected to the U.S.-led campaign against some of his most powerful foes. Washington says it wants to defeat Islamic State without helping Assad remain in power and hopes other anti-Assad groups can fill the vacuum.

But while U.S. planes have been striking Islamic State in eastern Syria, Assad's air force has been bombing other rebel groups in the west of the country, and his troops and allied Lebanese Shi'ite militia have advanced.

Syrian warplanes dropped projectiles including "barrel bombs" - oil drums filled with explosives - in Hama, Idlib, Homs and Aleppo provinces and around Damascus, the Observatory said.

Five people were killed when barrel bombs were dropped on al-Rastan city in Homs province and nine died in a barrel bomb attack east of the city of Aleppo, it said.

In Iraq, where the U.S. strikes have gone on for far longer and Washington is supporting government efforts to advance, Islamic State militants are changing tactics, ditching conspicuous convoys in favor of motorcycles and planting their black flags on civilian homes to confuse target spotters.

Witnesses and tribal sources in Islamic State-controlled areas report fewer militant checkpoints to weed out "apostates" and less cell phone use.Islamic State elements "abandoned one of their biggest headquarters in the village" when they heard the air strike campaign was likely to target their area, said a tribal sheikh from a village south of Kirkuk.

"They took all their furniture, vehicles and weapons. Then they planted roadside bombs and destroyed the headquarters," said the sheikh who declined to be identified. "They don't move in military convoys like before. Instead they use motorcycles, bicycles, and if necessary, they use camouflaged cars."

Tribal and local intelligence sources said an air strike on Thursday near Bashir town, 20 km (12 miles) south of Kirkuk, had killed two local senior Islamic State leaders while they were receiving a group of militants from Syria and Mosul. Ongoing fighting makes it impossible to verify the reports.

Sheikh Anwar al-Assy al-Obeidi, the head of a large tribe in Kirkuk and across Iraq, told Reuters there were now fewer killings because fighters could not operate as openly.

"They were executing people like drinking water ... Now the air strikes are very active and have decreased the (militants') ability," said Obeidi, who fled to Iraqi Kurdish-held territory this summer after Islamic State blew up his home.

(AP) — Confronted by the growing threat of Middle East militants, President Barack Obama implored world leaders at the United Nations Wednesday to rally behind his expanding military campaign to stamp out the violent Islamic State group and its "network of death."

"There can be no reasoning, no negotiation, with this brand of evil," Obama told the General Assembly. In a striking shift for a president who has been reluctant to take military action in the past, Obama declared that force is the only language the militants understand. He warned those who have joined their cause to "leave the battlefield while they can."

The widening war against the Islamic State was just one in a cascade of crises that confronted the presidents, prime ministers and monarchs at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Also vying for attention was Russia's continued provocations in Ukraine, a deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the plight of civilians caught in conflicts around the world.

"Not since the end of the Second World War have there been so many refugees, displaced people and asylum seekers," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he opened Wednesday's session.

In a rare move, Obama also chaired a meeting of the U.N. Security Council where members unanimously adopted a resolution requiring all countries to prevent the recruitment and transport of would-be foreign fighters preparing to join terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State group.

The American-led military campaign in the Middle East was at the center of much of the day's discussions. After weeks of airstrikes in Iraq, U.S. planes began hitting targets in Syria this week, joined by an unexpected coalition of five Arab nations: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

There were more U.S. and coalition airstrikes Wednesday on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border. U.S. and allied planes and drones hit a dozen targets in Syria that included small-scale oil refineries that have been providing millions of dollars to the Islamic State, the U.S. Central Command said. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took part in addition to U.S. aircraft.

France has also taken part in strikes in Iraq, and British Prime Minister David Cameron's office announced that Parliament was being recalled to London to debate whether to join the campaign, too.

The Islamic State has made lightning gains in Iraq this year and now moves freely across the increasingly blurred border with Syria. The group has claimed responsibility for the beheading of two American journalists and a British aid worker, sparking outrage in the West and contributing to an increase in public support for military action.

Shortly after Obama's remarks, France confirmed that Algerian extremists allied with the Islamic State group had beheaded one of its citizens after the French ignored demands to stop airstrikes in Iraq. French President Francois Hollande, who was in New York for the U.N. meetings, said the killing underscored why "the fight the international community needs to wage versus terrorism knows no borders."

U.S. officials say they are concerned that foreigners with Western passports could return to their home countries to carry out attacks. And even as Obama welcomed support for the resolution to deter foreign fighters, he said more must be done.

"The words spoken here today must be matched and translated into action," he said.

The threat from the Islamic State group has already drawn Obama back into conflicts in the Middle East that he has long sought to avoid, particularly in Syria, which is mired in a bloody three-year civil war. Just months ago, the president appeared to be on track to fulfill his pledge to end the U.S.-led wars he inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama sought to distinguish this current military campaign from those lengthy wars, declaring that he has no intention of sending U.S. troops to occupy foreign lands. He also pressed Middle Eastern nations to look beyond military action and take steps to reject the ideology that has spawned groups like the Islamic State and to cut off funding that has allowed that terror group and others to thrive.

"No external power can bring about a transformation of hearts and minds," Obama said in his nearly 40-minute address.

Apart from the Middle East, the president was particularly blunt in his condemnation of Russia's actions in Ukraine. He accused Moscow of sending arms to pro-Russian separatists, refusing to allow access to the site of a downed civilian airliner and then moving its own troops across the border with Ukraine.

Still, Obama held open the prospect of a resolution to the conflict. While he has previously expressed skepticism about a cease-fire signed this month, he said Wednesday that the agreement "offers an opening" for peace.

If Russia follows through, Obama said, the U.S. will lift economic sanctions that have damaged Russia's economy but so far failed to shift President Vladimir Putin's approach.

The chaotic global landscape Obama described Wednesday stood in contrast to his remarks at the U.N. one year ago, when he touted diplomatic openings on multiple fronts. At the time, the U.S. was embarking on a fresh attempt to forge an elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians and there were signs of a thaw in the decades-old tensions between the U.S. and Iran.

The Mideast talks have since collapsed, though the president said that "as bleak as the landscape appears, America will never give up the pursuit of peace." And while the U.S., Iran and world powers are now in the midst of nuclear negotiations, those talks are deadlocked and there is skepticism about whether a deal can be reached by a Nov. 24 deadline.

"My message to Iran's leaders and people is simple: Do not let this opportunity pass," Obama said.

Even as the president cast the U.S. as the main driver of peace and security around the world, he acknowledged that his country has not always lived up to its own ideals. He singled out the recent clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the shooting death of a black teenager.

"Yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions," Obama said. "But we welcome the scrutiny of the world. Because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect."

(Reuters) - If U.S.-led attacks knock out oil fields controlled by Islamic State militants, petroleum from the American drilling boom could make up for any shortfall on global markets, a report released by a Republican senator said on Wednesday.

U.S. bombs blasted Islamic State positions in Syria for a second day on Wednesday. Militants have been funding their efforts in part by seizing a dozen or so oilfields in Syria and Iraq, controlling refineries and smuggling oil and fuel to nearby markets.

In the United States, fracking and other advanced drilling techniques have helped push U.S. oil production to the highest level since the 1980s. That has led to a glut of light oil that many refiners are not able to process, and a call by some lawmakers to relax or lift the 40-year ban on oil exports.

"The historic growth in U.S. oil production could easily make up the shortfall to global oil markets," if Islamic State facilities are wiped out, said a report released by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the chamber's energy committee.

Murkowski and other supporters of lifting the export ban have also urged using U.S. oil supplies to pressure Russia over its intervention in Ukraine. Russia is a major producer and exporter of oil and a top supplier to Europe.

It is unclear exactly how much oil production is in control of Islamic State militants. The output appears to be less than 100,000 barrels per day, Adam Sieminski, head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, told the North Dakota Petroleum Council at its annual meeting on Wednesday.

Sieminski's office, part of the Department of Energy, and the State Department are working on getting more precise numbers, he said.

The amount, however, is very small compared with the global market of about 90 million barrels per day. And concerns about oil prices damaging the world economy have ebbed for now. Brent crude oil prices, a global benchmark, hit 2-year lows of $96 per barrel on Wednesday.

Still, the world's spare oil capacity, or the amount crude producers can quickly bring on line without major investments, is only a few million barrels per day and is held mostly in Saudi Arabia.

The Obama administration opened a crack in the crude oil export ban earlier this year with two approvals to ship minimally processed light oil known as condensate, but such approvals have been put on hold since then.