Rockets fired from Syrian territory targeted the Turkish border town of Karkamis (southeast) on Monday, killing three people, including a child, and wounding six, the Turkish Interior Minister announced. “Three of our citizens lost their lives. One of them is a child, another is a teacher,” Süleyman Soylu said live on television, promising a “strong response.” The Minister of Education, Mahmut Özer, for his part mentioned “three dead and ten injured”.
The governor of Gaziantep province, Davut Gül, had previously reported two dead and six wounded, two of them seriously, after “five mortars/rockets were fired (…) towards the center of Karkamis”.
Turkish air raids in Syria
Images published by Turkish media, including the official Anadolu news agency, show the broken windows of a school and a heavy truck in flames. According to Anadolu, the rockets hit a high school and two houses, as well as a truck near the border crossing that connects Karkamis to the Syrian town of Jarablus.
Rocket fire from Syria had already reached a Turkish border post on Sunday, injuring at least eight people – two Turkish soldiers and six policemen. Turkey carried out air raids in northern Iraq and Syria on Sunday that killed around 30 people in several areas under the control of Syrian Kurdish forces and the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, accused by Ankara of ordering the attack that left six dead and 80 injured on 13 November in Istanbul.