British IS recruiter Sally-Anne Jones was reportedly killed in a US drone strike in Syria in June.

Jones, from Chatham in Kent, joined so-called Islamic State after converting to Islam and travelling to Syria in 2013. Her death was first reported by The Sun.

Jones had been a useful propaganda agent for IS on social media and her death would be “significant”.

Whitehall officials have declined to comment publicly. However, they have not denied the story, and US sources are confident she was killed in an unmanned drone strike in June, our correspondent added.

Jones, 48 – who had no previous military training – had been married to the jihadist Junaid Hussain, who was killed in 2015 in a drone strike. Previously a punk musician, she had been used to recruit western girls to the group and posted threatening messages to Christians in the UK.

Jones, who was born in Greenwich, London, also encouraged individuals to carry out attacks in Britain, offering guidance on how to construct home-made bombs. She used her Twitter account to provide practical advice on how to travel to Syria and shared pictures of herself posing with weapons.

There appears to have been no reaction to Jones’s reported death from Arabic-speaking online supporters of ISworldwide. But it said this was typical in such cases.

IS never publicly acknowledged Jones – also known as Umm Hussein al-Britaniyah – as a member. Women occasionally feature in IS’s official propaganda and only as authors of articles in its monthly publications.

Jones’s husband, Hussain, was a computer hacker for IS and was regarded as a “high value target” before his death.

In 2015 the then Prime Minister David Cameron said Hussain had been planning “barbaric attacks against the West”, including terror plots targeting “high profile public commemorations”.

News of Jones’s death has not previously been made public amid fears that her 12-year-old son, Jojo, may also have been killed in the June strike, according to The Sun.
Major General Chip Chapman, former MoD head of counter terror, said under the UN Charters the boy would be too young to be classed as a soldier and would not have been targeted, “even if he got up to really bad things”. “We don’t know for sure whether he was with her or not,” he added.

Azadeh Moaveni, a journalist and author of the book Lipstick Jihad, said Jones had been one of the most “iconic” recruiters for IS because she helped the group to project the idea it could “get into the very the reaches of British society”.

The BBC’s Frank Gardner said although it was “very likely” Jones has been killed, it was difficult to be certain because that would require sending a special forces team to gather DNA.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: “We do not comment on matters of national security.”