Syria on Sunday denied targeting a village in Aleppo province a day earlier, instead blaming Kurdish-led forces for an attack that a human rights monitor said killed seven civilians.
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The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that five women and two children were killed on Saturday in the village of Umm Tina, in the Deir Hafer area of Aleppo province, in bombardment carried out “by Syrian army personnel.”
A semi-autonomous Kurdish administration controls swathes of north and northeast Syria, including oil and gas fields, with the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as its de facto army.
The Deir Hafer area is controlled by the SDF but is located along the front lines between the Syrian army and the forces, and periodic clashes take place in the area, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told journalists.
In a statement carried by state news agency SANA, the defence ministry said that “our forces detected the launch of rockets from one of the SDF launchers towards the village of Umm Tina.”
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It said the reason for the launch was unknown.