(CNN) The White House announced Thursday evening that Qassim al-Rimi, the leader of terror group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in an airstrike in Yemen.

CNN reported last week that the US conducted a strike targeting Rimi, who led the terror group's franchise based in Yemen that has repeatedly expressed interest in conducting attacks targeting the United States, a US official said. The Pentagon did not comment when asked at the time about the report.

The US government had offered a $10 million reward for information on Rimi.

The news comes following several other successful US military efforts to remove high profile Middle Eastern leaders. President Donald Trump ordered a US airstrike in January that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani , and in October, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died in a nighttime raid conducted by US forces on his compound in northern Syria.

While not on the same level as Baghdadi and Soleimani, the death of the leader of AQAP is still a significant moment. Rimi had been a US target since early in Trump's tenure. Rimi was a target of a January 2017 raid on an al Qaeda compound in Yemen that led to the first US military combat death under the President, a senior US military official told CNN at the time.

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