ISTANBUL (AP) — Three Turkish soldiers were killed and 10 were wounded in northern Syria on Thursday in what the Turkish military said was a pre-dawn airstrike believed to have been carried out by Syrian government forces.
A statement posted on the website of the Turkish Armed Forces said the attack took place at 3 a.m. but did not provide an exact location for the strike. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said the airstrike took place near the town of al-Bab, which Turkish-backed Syrian opposition forces are trying to take back from the Islamic State group.
However, a Syrian monitoring group that tracks the conflict through a network of activists on the ground said the deaths of the Turkish soldiers were caused by an IS suicide attack on Wednesday, disputing the Turkish government claim of a Thursday airstrike.
Rami Abdurrahman, who runs the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the suicide attack occurred Wednesday in the rural area of al-Bab, near a village called Waqqah. He dismissed reports that it was an airstrike.
The discrepancies in the statements from Ankara and Abdurrahman could not be immediately resolved. There was no comment from Damascus but the Aamaq news agency, an IS media arm, also reported a suicide attack against Turkish troops in a village in rural al-Bab on Wednesday.
The area is remote and no independent reporting is possible from there.
One of the wounded soldiers was said to be in critical condition, the Turkish military said.
If the attack is confirmed to be a Syrian government airstrike, it is likely to ratchet up tensions between Ankara and Damascus.
In August, Ankara sent ground troops into northern Syria to support Syrian opposition fighters battle the IS and to curb Syrian Kurdish forces’ territorial gains. Ankara views Syrian Kurdish troops as an extension of the Kurdish insurgency in southeastern Turkey.
The Turkish troops are not fighting Syrian government forces and the attack would be the first assault on Turkish soldiers by the Syrian government forces.
In Ankara, Turkey’s main opposition party leader urged the government to act “with common sense” and not escalate tensions.
“This (issue) could drag Turkey toward a very dangerous process,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu said on Thursday.
Citing national security considerations, Turkish authorities imposed a temporary media ban on coverage of the attack, barring media outlets from reports that “foster fear, panic and chaos,” and contain images of the deceased or the wounded, or exaggerated accounts.
The bodies of the dead were taken to the morgue in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep by helicopter, the Turkish army said. The 10 wounded soldiers were being treated at hospitals in Gaziantep and in the neighboring city of Kilis.
The Turkish military, meanwhile, pressed ahead with its efforts to capture al-Bab.
Turkish warplanes struck IS positions in al-Bab and the northern Syrian towns of Kabbasin, Bzagah and Arimah, destroying a building reportedly used as an IS headquarters and seven defensive positions, Anadolu reported, citing unnamed Turkish military officials.
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Associated Press Writers Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed to this report.
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