U.S. military kills two Islamic State "officials" in Syrian raid

 U.S. Central Command said Sunday that U.S. forces killed two Islamic State group "officials" in a night raid on eastern Syria.

CFOR said in a statement that troops "conducted a successful helicopter raid in eastern Syria at 2:57 a.m. (2357 GMT)... killed two ISIS officers", but did not provide a more specific location.

One of the victims was identified as "Anas," an Islamic State "Syrian province official" involved in "planning and assisting operations in eastern Syria," the statement said.

War monitors at Syria's Observatory for Human Rights said it was the "most prominent" anti-Islamic State operation in at least three weeks.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) counter-terrorism unit also participated in Sunday's operation and identified the village of Al-Zor in eastern Deir ez-Zor province as a target area, said Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the Human Rights Watch station.

Central Command called it a "unilateral action," adding that "preliminary assessments indicate no civilian casualties."

The United States supports the Syrian Democratic Forces, the de facto Kurdish army in northern Syria, and in 2019 led the battle to drive ISIS from the last rubble of its Syrian territory.

Hundreds of U.S. troops remain in Syria as part of an international coalition fighting remnants of the Islamic State.

Turkey said it launched November 20 attacks on Kurdish fighter positions in northern Syria and Iraq, which were blamed on Kurdish groups, following a deadly bombing in Istanbul last month.

Ankara said it had attacked the positions of the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which controls the Syrian Democratic Forces, but Ankara considered it a branch of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday that the Kremlin must "cleanse" Kurdish forces from Syria's northern border region.

The Syrian Democratic Forces have warned that Turkey's threatened ground invasion will jeopardize the fight against ISIS.