DHAKA: The United Nations Security Council has taken a tough line against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, blacklisting six people including the group's spokesman and threatening sanctions against its financiers and weapons suppliers.

The 15-member council unanimously adopted on Friday a resolution that aims to weaken the Islamic State - an al-Qaeda splinter group that has seized swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate - and al-Qaeda's Syrian wing Nusra Front.

Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has long been blacklisted by the Security Council, while Nusra Front was added earlier this year.

"We have watched in horror their brutal actions," said Mark Lyall Grant, UK ambassador to the UN and presiding officer of the UN council meeting. "They are deliberately targeting civlians."

Both groups are designated under the UN al-Qaeda sanctions regime.

Friday's resolution named six people who will be subject to an international travel ban, asset freeze and arms embargo. They include Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, an Iraqi described by UN experts as one of the group's "most influential emirs" and close to its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Islamic State's swift and brutal push to the borders of Iraq's autonomous ethnic Kurdish region and toward Baghdad has sparked the first US air strikes in Iraq since the withdrawal of American troops in 2011.

The Security Council resolution "deplores and condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist acts of ISIL and its violent extremist ideology, and its continued gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law."

Source: Al-Jazeera

BDST: 0910 HRS, AUG 15, 2014