Foreign ministers from nations fighting the Islamic State group will meet virtually next week to coordinate action as the coronavirus pandemic disrupts operations, the United States announced Wednesday.

Top diplomats from the 82-nation coalition will hold talks on June 4 to "discuss ways to keep continuous pressure on ISIS's remnants in Iraq and Syria and strengthen our collective approach to defeat ISIS's global ambitions," the State Department said.

The nations will also look to manage "the challenges the coalition faces due to the COVID-19 pandemic," it said in a statement.

The United States, the host of the last ministerial meeting in November, is leading the virtual talks alongside Italy, which had hoped to hold a major counterterrorism meeting before being hit hard by the pandemic.

President Donald Trump last year declared the defeat of the Islamic State group, which once held vast swathes of land, as he moved to pull US troops out of Syria.

A raid in October by US special forces killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the movement notorious for its grisly attacks against civilians and enslavement of non-Muslims.

But alarm has been growing over attacks by the extremists around the world including in Africa and Afghanistan.

The United States blamed the group for a horrific attack earlier this month on a maternity hospital in Kabul, saying the militants wanted to scuttle a nascent peace process between Afghanistan and the Kabul government.

Arms depot blast kills 6 jihadists in NW Syria: monitor
Beirut (AFP) May 27, 2020 - Six jihadists were killed Wednesday in an explosion that hit their arms depot in northwest Syria while Russian warplanes flew overhead, a war monitoring group said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights did not say if Russia was behind the blast that killed the non-Syrian jihadists allied with the Turkistan Islamic Party, a Uighur-dominated jihadist group.

"We don't know if it is the result of aerial bombardment or an explosion inside the warehouse," Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman said.

If confirmed, it would mark the first Russian strike on the Idlib region since a ceasefire went into effect in March.

Home to some three million people, the last major opposition bastion in Idlib is controlled by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) alliance, led by Al-Qaeda's former Syria affiliate.

A Russian-backed regime offensive between December and March displaced nearly a million people in the northwest, but at least 140,000 have returned since a ceasefire went into effect, according to the United Nations.

The truce, which coincided with the novel coronavirus crisis, had put a stop to the relentless air strikes by the regime and Russia that killed at least 500 civilians in four months.

Wednesday's explosion hit an arms depot in the al-Taybat village near the town of Jisr al-Shughur, which is controlled by the HTS-allied Turkistan Islamic Party, the Observatory said.

Russian warplanes were flying overhead at the time of the blast, it added.

Nearly half of Idlib's population consists of Syrians displaced from other parts of the country.

The war in Syria has killed more than 380,000 people and displaced nearly half of the country's pre-war population since it started in 2011.

While a ceasefire in Syria has reduced combat between rebels and government forces, mercenaries from the two sides are still fighting in Libya on behalf of their Russian and Turkish backers.

UN experts estimated that up to 5,000 Syrian mercenaries may be in Libya, including "those fighters recruited by Turkey in support of the" UN-recognised Government of National Accord.

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