Kurdish ultras target school in Turkish border town, 3 killed

Ankara, November 21

Suspected Kurdish militants in Syria fired rockets across the border into Turkey on Monday, killing at least three people and wounding 10 others, officials said.

The attack followed deadly airstrikes by Turkey on suspected militants targets in Syria and Iraq.

The rockets struck a high school and two houses in the town of Karkamis, in Gaziantep province, as well as a truck near a Turkish-Syria border gate, a state-run news agency reported.

Interior minister Suleyman Soylu said the dead include a teacher and a child. One of the rockets landed on the grounds of a high school but there were no fatalities there.

A soldier and seven police officers were wounded overnight in separate shelling by suspected Kurdish militants that targeted a border area in nearby Kilis, Soylu said.

Turkey would respond to the attacks “in the strongest way possible,” the minister said. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces opened fire toward Karkamis from its positions near the Syrian border town of Kobani, according to Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor.

He added that Turkish troops retaliated by firing towards SDF positions on the Syrian side but there was no word on casualties yet.

While Kurdish-led forces in Syria have not commented nor claimed responsibility for the attacks, the Syrian Democratic Forces in a statement on Monday vowed to respond to Turkish airstrikes “effectively and efficiently at the right time and place.”

On Monday, Turkish President Erdogan signalled Turkey was also contemplating a ground incursion against the militant groups. — AP