ANKARA — Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said on Monday that his country’s troops targeted several Kurdish positions in northern Syria, killing 10 militants in a major cross-border escalation.

Akar said Turkey's armed forces were responding to shelling and rocket attacks by Syrian Kurdish groups that wounded four Turkish soldiers over the weekend. Turkish soldiers were taken to Turkey for treatment. “All known terrorist targets have been under fire. We have four wounded,” he said.

Britain-based war monitor The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said over the weekend that the two Turkish soldiers were critically wounded as result of shelling that was launched from northern Syrian regions that are controlled by the US-allied Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as well as groups loyal to the Syrian government. 

Ankara has blamed the attack on the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of  the SDF. Ankara considers the Syrian Kurdish groups terrorist organizations, equating them to an outlawed armed outfit fighting the Turkish government for some four decades for self-rule inside Turkey.