BEIRUT — Airstrikes on Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province killed at least 11 people on Monday, opposition activists said, in the latest spasm of violence to mar UN-brokered talks in Geneva between the government and the opposition.
Separately, there were unconfirmed reports that a top Al Qaeda official was killed in an airstrike, also in Idlib.
Also on Monday, progovernment forces drove 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 ISIS capital, Raqqa, opposition activists said.
The SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist groups, said Abdullah Muhammad Rajab Abdulrahman, the deputy to Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, may have been killed in a US airstrike on an unmarked sedan on Sunday evening. It cited reports circulating on jihadi social media accounts.
The northwestern province falls under the control of an Al Qaeda-linked rebel coalition. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by fighting are living as refugees there.
Images of the vehicle purported to have been carrying Abdulrahman, known more widely by his nom de guerre Abu al-Khayr 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.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that a top Al Qaeda official was killed in a drone strike, but could not confirm it was Abdulrahman.
Abdulrahman was a close associate of Osama Bin Laden and 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.
There was no immediate comment from the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, government forces and allied Hezbollah fighters 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 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 ISIS.
‘‘The Syrian regime claims it is fighting terrorism but it is not. It cut the path for the Free Syrian Army factions to reach Raqqa,’’ said Colonel Abu Firas, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, a loose alliance of mainstream rebels.
