Damascus, Jan 2 (IANS): The US-led anti-terror coalition carried out several airstrikes against positions of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group in their de facto capital of al-Raqqa in northern Syria Friday.

The US-led coalition conducted about 14 airstrikes on the outskirts of al-Raqqa and the Furusiyeh area between midnight Thursday and early Friday, Xinhua reported citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But the Britain-based watchdog group said there was no news on causalities yet.

Al-Raqqa fell to the IS last year and the US strikes repeatedly targeted the IS positions in that area, which was declared by the group as their de facto capital in northern Syria.

Separately, the observatory, which relies on a network of activists on ground, said the IS's presence has largely declined in the predominantly Kurdish city of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, in northern Syria close to the Turkish borders.

Head of the observatory, Rami Abdul-Rahman said on TV that the Kurdish militants of the People's Protection Units (YPG) controlled 70 percent of that contested city.

The observatory said an IS leader from a Gulf state was killed Friday during clashes with the YPG in Kobani, adding that intermittent clashes erupted between the warring camps on the outskirts of the city and the vicinity of the Rash Library in its southern part.

The anti-terror coalition also carried out two airstrikes against the IS in the city, leaving unknown number of losses, according to the Observatory.

The US-led alliance started targeting the IS in Syria in late last September, managing, albeit a little, to stem the expansion of that group.

Meanwhile, intense clashes renewed Friday morning between Syrian troops and an array of jihadi militants in the suburb of Jobar in the eastern countryside of Damascus, according to the pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV.

The government troops heavily shelled the rebels' positions in Jobar and detonated a number of tunnels the rebels had dug in that area to facilitate the flow of arms and fighters between rebel-held areas in the eastern al-Ghouta countryside.

The observatory also reported heavy battles in Jobar, adding that Lebanese Hezbollah militants were fighting alongside the Syrian troops there.

It said the Syrian troops fired at least one surface-to-surface missile on Jobar, and that the rebels there fired a mortar shell that slammed into the Baghdad Street in the heart of the capital, with no causalities reported.

The Syrian troops have been engaged in battles against the rebels in Jobar since 2013. The military forces recently unleashed a wide-scale offensive to recapture the town after the rebels there posed a threat to the capital.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited the frontlines in Jobar on New Year's Eve to support his troops there and to showcase power and confidence at the start of 2015.

Other areas in eastern Damascus were subject to government shelling, such as the rebel-held city of Douma, said the observatory, adding that the air force dropped barrel bombs on rebel-held areas in the northern countryside of the central province of Hama and near the military airbase of Abu Duhur in the province of Idlib.

The observatory said 76,021 people were killed in 2014 alone, 33,278 of whom were civilians. Previous reports placed the death toll during the nearly four-year crisis at over 190,000.

As the violence kept grinding on, Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi said the Syrian government had approved to take part in the Russia-sponsored meeting with the opposition forces in Moscow, which showed the government's belief in the political process as the sole way to reach solutions.

In an interview with the national TV Thursday, the minister said Syria's consent to attend the consultative and preliminary meeting in Moscow, slated for late January, came in line with the government's main aim of the need to achieve a solution between the Syrians themselves without foreign pressures.

According to the state news agency SANA, al-Zoubi said the planned talks would pave the way for later steps that could include a dialogue conference between the Syrians.