Beirut. Six people were killed and 30 others were injured in a rocket attack on a Syrian city controlled by Turkish-backed opposition fighters on Thursday. Syrian rescue teams and a war monitoring group gave this information. Both have blamed US-backed Syrian Kurdish forces for the attack. The city of Afrin has been under the control of Turkey and its allies Syrian opposition fighters since 2018.
Syrian Kurdish fighters and thousands of Kurdish residents were pushed out of the region in a Turkish-backed military operation in 2018. Since then, Afrin and the surrounding villages have been targets of Turkish and Turkish-backed fighters. Turkey considers Kurdish fighters who control Syrian territory along its border as terrorists, who are allied with Kurdish rebels within Turkey. Turkey has carried out three military strikes in Syria, mostly to drive Syrian Kurdish militias away from its borders.
The ‘White Helmets’ said that the rocket attack had caught fire in a residential area of Afrin, which has been extinguished by its volunteers. In a video from ‘White Helmets’, rescue workers are seen pulling charred bodies out of the damaged building and some others are seen dousing the fire. The White Helmets is a Syrian civil defense organization operating in areas held by the opposition.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (a war watchdog) confirmed six people were killed in the attack and said two children were among the dead, while 30 others were wounded. The US-led coalition has been supporting Syrian Kurdish fighters since 2014 in the fight against Islamic State militants that occupy a third of Iraq and Syria.