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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A Syrian Republican Guard commander was killed on Friday after a Turkish drone strike targeted a meeting of regime forces in Aleppo, a regime official has claimed.
This follows the deaths of at least 33 Turkish soldiers by regime forces in neighboring Idlib province, the latest in a spate of attacks heightening tensions between Ankara and Damascus.
“Turkish drones targeted a building in Aleppo countryside where [the] Syrian army was holding a military meeting, leading to deaths, including Brigadier Burhan Rahmun, commander of the 124 Brigade from the Republic Guard,” a source from the Syrian army told a Rudaw reporter in Syria.
The brigade of the Republican Guard is said to have been stationed in Aleppo for some time.
The attack was confirmed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), putting the regime death toll at 11. The British-based war monitor did not specifically mention Rahmun, however.
Hours later, regime forces killed one Turkish soldier and injured two others, according to the Turkish Defense Ministry. Ankara responded by "neutralizing" 56 regime soldiers.
Ankara and some of its Western allies have condemned recent regime attacks on Turkish forces, but Damascus claimed that these countries are “supporting terrorism.”
“Supporting terrorism has become a constant strategy of the policies of Turkish regime and Western countries to reach their despicable and morally rejected goals,” a source from Syria's foreign ministry told state media outlet SANA.
Backed by the Russian air force, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allied groups launched an extensive offensive against rebels in the northwestern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo in December, recapturing more than a hundred towns and villages it lost since the early years of Syrian civil war in 2011.
Idlib and parts of Aleppo were controlled by pro-Turkey Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadists and other allied rebel groups until the operaion to oust them began last year, displacing almost a million civilians. Turkey has at least 12 observation posts in Idlib and claims to protect them from regime forces who have recently surrounded some of them.
The deaths of five Turkish soldiers and a civilian contractor by Damascus troops in early February pushed Ankara-Damascus relations to boiling point, with Ankara conducting several retaliatory attacks against the SAA.
Updated at 8:05 am (GMT+3).
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