A U.S.-LED coalition has killed 10 Islamic State leaders in the past month with targeted airstrikes, a spokesman said Tuesday.

    “Over the past month, we’ve killed 10 IS leadership figures with targeted airstrikes, including several external attack planners, some of whom are linked to the Paris attacks,” said U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamist group.

    “Others had designs on further attacking the West.”

    One of those killed was Abdul Qader Hakim, who facilitated the militants’ external operations and had links to the Paris attack network, Warren said. He was killed in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Dec. 26.

    Two days earlier, a coalition strike in Syria killed Charaffe al Mouadan, a Syria-based Islamic State member with a direct link to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the coordinated bombings and shootings in Paris on Nov. 13, which killed 130 people, Warren said.

    Mouadan was planning further attacks against the West, he added.

    Airstrikes on Islamic State’s leadership helped explain recent battlefield successes against the group, which also lost control of a dam on a strategic supply route near its de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria on Saturday.

    “Part of those successes is attributable to the fact that the organization is losing its leadership,” Warren said.

    He warned, however: “It’s still got fangs.”

    The Iraqi army’s seizure of the center of Ramadi on Sunday is its first major victory against the hard-line Sunni Islamists that swept through a third of Iraq in 2014, and came after months of cautious advances backed by coalition airstrikes.

    Arriving by helicopter in the shattered city west of Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi traveled in a convoy of Humvees and met soldiers at the main government complex captured by counter-terrorism forces Monday.

    He had announced the visit to Ramadi himself on Twitter and declared Thursday a national holiday in celebration.

    Ramadi was the only city to have fallen under Islamic State control since Abadi took office in September 2014.

    The retaking of Ramadi suggested Abadi’s strategy of heavy U.S. air support while sidelining the Shiite militias could be effective. The militias have served as a bulwark against Islamic State but drawn objections from Washington. (SD-Agencies)