An ISIL leader with "direct" ties to the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks was among 10 of the group’s higher-ups killed in Syria and Iraq this month, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

An ISIL leader with "direct" ties to the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks was among 10 of the group's higher-ups killed in Syria and Iraq this month, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

The US military claims such strikes are helping weaken the terrorist group, which captured large parts of Iraq and Syria last year but has recently seen significant setbacks including this week's loss of Ramadi in Iraq.

Baghdad-based US military spokesman Colonel Steve Warren told reporters that French national Charaffe el Mouadan was killed in a US-led coalition air strike on December 24.

Mouadan had been actively plotting further attacks against the West, Warren said, without giving additional details.

"He was a Syrian-based ISIL member with a direct link to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Paris attacks cell leader," Warren said in a video call, using an alternative acronym for the ISIL group.

Abaaoud was killed in a major police raid in northern Paris five days after the attacks that left 130 people dead and wounded hundreds more in a series of coordinated suicide attacks and shootings across the French capital.

A French law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP there was no immediate evidence showing Mouadan was involved in the Paris attacks.

The official said Mouadan had been close to Samy Amimour, one of the suicide bombers that attacked the Bataclan music venue, and he also knew Omar Ismail Mostefai, another one of the attackers.