Turkish and Syrian troops traded deadly fire in Syria’s northwest on Monday, further raising tension between Ankara and regime backer Moscow over the war-torn Idlib rebel enclave.
An air strike also killed at least nine civilians in the same area, where the latest government offensive has caused one of the nine-year-old Syrian conflict’s worst waves of displacement.
The tit-for-tat shelling between Damascus and Ankara was the deadliest since Turkey deployed troops in Syria in 2016 and escalated tensions between the conflict’s two top foreign brokers.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had offered rare criticism of Russia last week, accusing it of “not honouring” agreements to prevent a regime offensive on the northwestern region of Idlib.
The overnight clash began with regime shelling on Turkish positions in Idlib, hours after a Turkish military convoy of at least 240 vehicles entered northwest Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor.
The attack killed four Turkish soldiers and wounded nine others despite previous coordination on where Ankara’s forces would be in the region, Turkey’s defence ministry said.
The Russian defence ministry said Ankara had failed to give prior warning of its troop movements at the time of the incident.
