BEIRUT: Foreigners make up the vast majority of the more than 140 militants killed by US-led airstrikes on the Islamic State group in Syria, a monitoring group said Thursday.

Fighters from Europe, Arab nations, Chechnya and Turkey dominated total the number of people killed, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

At least 13 civilians have also been killed in the airstrikes carried out by the US and its Gulf Arab allies this week.

“A total of 84 Islamic State militants and 57 Al-Nusra Front fighters have been killed, among them just 12 Syrians,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Al-Nusra Front is Syria’s official Al-Qaeda branch.

Abdel Rahman said that of the 12 Syrian fighters killed, 11 were members of the Islamic State group, and one was a member of Al-Nusra Front.

Meanwhile, France carried out a fresh round of air strikes in Iraq Thursday as it renewed its determination to fight Islamic State after the beheading of hostage Herve Gourdel.

President Francois Hollande pledged “determination, composure and vigilance” in the face of jihadi threats at a Cabinet meeting and announced that flags nationwide would be flown at half-mast for three days from Friday to mourn the loss of the 55-year-old mountaineer.

“Faced with this threat, we need national unity,” he told the meeting, according to government spokesman Stephane Le Foll, who also announced France had carried out airstrikes in restive Iraq on Thursday morning — the second in the space of a week.

Paris has six Rafale fighter jets and just under 1,000 soldiers based in the UAE and on Friday carried out its first airstrike on IS targets in Iraq, destroying a logistics depot.

As the Cabinet meeting ended, Hollande went straight into crisis defense talks during which, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has said, “everything would be looked at again,” including “what we want to do in Iraq and what will happen in Syria.”

In the French Alpine village of Saint-Martin-Vesubie, where Gourdel worked as a guide in the Mercantour national park, mayor Henri Guige said he was “shocked.”

“For me, this is a war in which they are attacking civilians, the innocent,” he told AFP.

A passionate photographer and mountaineer, Gourdel liked going off the beaten track, though he was always careful, his friends said.

Close friend Laurent Geny described him as someone who is “profoundly good, very humane and who loves the Maghreb culture.”

“No one deserves to go through that. But him even less because he knew the Maghreb well, he had strong links with the Maghreb,” he added.

Gourdel had for years trained mountain guides in Morocco.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls vowed: “France will never give in to terror. Today, the whole country is grieving but united around our values, around that which, more than ever, defines France.”