Syrian Mortar Shell Kills Man in Turkey
A man was killed and his daughter wounded in southeastern Turkey by a mortar shell fired from across the border with war-torn Syria, health officials said.
The latest incident brought to 10 the number of casualties on the Turkish side of the border since last year as a result of the conflict raging in Syria.
The man was killed when a stray shell hit his house in Ceylanpinar, a town directly across the border from the Syrian town of Ras Al-Ain, which has seen fighting between Syrian Kurdish militants and radical jihadists in recent months.
An Agence France Presse correspondent saw at least a dozen Turkish fighter jets take off from their base in the Kurdish-majority province of Diyarbakir and fly across the Syrian border after the incident.
Turkish authorities closed the schools in the town for security reasons.
In the deadliest attack, a mortar bomb fired from Syrian territory killed five Turkish civilians in the border town of Akcakale in October last year, prompting Ankara to turn to its NATO allies for the deployment of Patriot missiles.
Since then, the Turkish military has retaliated in kind for every Syrian shell that has landed on its soil.
Turkey, currently home to more than 600,000 Syrian refugees, has cut ties with the regime in Damascus since President Bashar Assad's deadly crackdown on anti-government protests.
Kurdish fighters affiliated with Turkey's separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) have meanwhile struggled to carve out an autonomous region in northeastern Syria similar to one in northern Iraq.
Source: Agence France Presse
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