A rocket attack on a northern Syrian town controlled by Turkey-backed opposition fighters killed four civilians and wounded over a dozen people on Thursday, Syrian rescuers and a war monitor said. Both blamed U.S-backed Syrian Kurdish forces for the attack.

The town of Afrin has been under control of Turkey and its allied Syrian opposition fighters since 2018, following a Turkey-backed military operation that pushed Syrian Kurdish fighters and thousands of Kurdish residents from the area.

Since then, Afrin and surrounding villages have been the site of attacks on Turkish and Turkey-backed targets. Ankara considers Kurdish fighters who control a swath of Syrian territory along Turkey’s border to be terrorists, allied with Kurdish insurgents within Turkey.

Turkey has carried out three military offensives into Syria, mostly to drive the Syrian Kurdish militia away from its border.

The White Helmets, a Syrian civil defense group operating in opposition-held areas, said the rockets also caused a fire in a residential area of Afrin which its volunteers put out.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war-monitoring group, said a child was among those killed. It said at least 30 people were wounded.

Syrian Kurdish fighters were allied with the U.S.-led coalition in the fight against Islamic State militants who captured a third of Iraq and Syria in 2014. IS was defeated and Kurdish forces have since created an autonomous administration in northeastern Syria, where a small U.S. force is still based.

AP