At least nine members of the same family, including seven children, were killed in an alleged Turkish drone strike near the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani late Sunday, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said in a statement on Monday. 

The SDF said Turkish “warplanes” struck the family of farmers in an area between two villages south of Kobani. Turkey's Directorate of Communications Center for Countering Disinformation said that the SDF's claims were false in a statement released late Monday night. "The operations carried out by the Turkish armed forces inside and outside the country as part of its struggle against terrorism directly target terror groups," it said. The SDF accuses Turkey of conducting a sustained campaign of air strikes that have left dozens of civilians dead and knocked out critical infrastructure including power stations, oil production facilities and bakeries. Rights groups, aid agencies and the United Nations have verified some of the claims. 

Photographs of the victims circulated by the SDF's press office showed motionless toddlers with charred faces. Blood streamed down their cheeks, from their nostrils and mouths.  

The attack came as Turkey continued to engage with the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, who called on his fighters to disarm and dissolve themselves on Feb. 27, in a statement that was read out by members of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM party. 

DEM party lawmaker Tuncer Bakirhan suggested on Monday that the attack was aimed at torpedoing the peace effort and drew parallels with the 2013 murders of three PKK women activists in Paris that was carried out by an alleged Turkish intelligence asset just as the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan embarked on a previous round of talks with the rebels that eventually failed. “Our expectation from Erdogan is for him to expose this sabotage [attempt],” Bakirhan said.