Rocket strikes Turkish school near Syria, 1 dead

At least one woman was killed on Monday in a suspected Katyusha rocket attack on a school in southern Turkey, officials said.

Citing a government official, Reuters reported that the authorities were investigating whether the mortar shells had been fired from Syria.

The mayor of Kilis, Hasan Kara, said the cause of the explosion may have been “two or more mortars” fired from Syria. The blast reportedly took place at 9:30 a.m. on January 18 near the Nazlı Ömer Çetin primary school in the center of Kilis, where four schools are located.

The private broadcaster NTV showed pictures of the wounded being rushed to the public hospital.

A female school cleaner was killed and a schoolgirl required an operation for her injuries in the strike on the town of Kilis just north of the border with Syria, the local governor’s office said.

Ankara has been accused by some Western allies of waking up too late to the threat from Islamic State and allowing foreign fighters to cross its territory and join the group’s ranks in the early stages of the conflict, something Turkey denies. Turkish towns in the region have frequently seen artillery fire spill over during Syria’s civil war, about to enter its sixth year.

It is almost six years since the start of the Syrian crisis, and frontier towns and cities have often fallen victim to cross-border shelling in the past. The Turkish Armed Forces responded to the attack, sources stated.

A suicide bombing last week in Istanbul, blamed on IS, killed 10 people.

Turkey is part of the US-led coalition against IS and has also been a target of the group.