Turkey bombed military targets in Syria

Turkey's military struck targets inside Syria on Wednesday in response to a mortar bomb fired from Syrian territory which killed five Turkish civilians, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's office said in a statement.

Our armed forces in the border region responded immediately to this abominable attack in line with their rules of engagement; targets were struck through artillery fire against places in Syria identified by radar, the statement said.

"Turkey will never leave unanswered such kinds of provocation by the Syrian regime against our national security," it added.

Davutoğlu had also agreed with NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the need for an emergency meeting of NATO members, the statement said.

A mortar bomb fired from Syria landed in a residential district of the southeastern Turkish town of Akçakale on Wednesday, killing a woman and four children from the same family and wounding at least 13 other people.

A cloud of dust and smoke rose up over low-rise buildings as residents ran to help the wounded. Others, infuriated by the increasing spillover of violence from Syria's civil war, took to the streets shouting protests against the local authorities.

Davutoğlu phoned UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to brief him about the incident and also spoke with senior military officials and Syria crisis mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, his ministry said in a statement.

Davutoğlu signaled over the weekend that Turkey would take action if there was a repeat of a mortar strike which damaged homes and workplaces in Akçakale last Friday.

"It (latest mortar round) hit right in the middle of the neighbourhood. The wife and four children from the same family died," Ahmet Emin Meşhurgül, local head of the Turkish Red Crescent, told Reuters, adding he knew the victims personally.

"People here are anxious, because we got hit before. Security forces tried to convince people to empty the neighbourhood near the border, but now we've been hit right in the middle of the town," he said.

A Reuters witness saw three police officers among the wounded being taken to hospital.

Erdoğan long cultivated good relations with Assad but became a harsh critic after Syria's popular revolt began last year, accusing him of creating a "terrorist state". Erdoğan has allowed Syrian opposition fighters to organize on Turkish soil and pushed for a foreign-protected safe zone inside Syria.

The Obama administration said it is "outraged" by the Syrian mortar shell. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the US is consulting its NATO ally on what she termed a "very dangerous situation."

She plans to speak to her Turkish counterpart later on Wednesday.

Speaking in Washington, Clinton said Syria's leaders were causing untold suffering to their own people, driven solely by their desire to cling to power.

Rasmussen told Davutoğlu in a phone conversation on Wednesday that he strongly condemned the mortar strike from Syria, a NATO spokeswoman said.

The spokeswoman said NATO continued to follow developments in the region "closely and with great concern".

Davutoğlu earlier had contacted Rasmussen, who has said repeatedly that NATO has no intention of intervening in Syria but stood ready to defend NATO member Turkey, if necessary.

Gunfire straying over border

Syria's worsening bloodshed has increasingly affected border zones, with stray bullets flying into Turkish territory.

"Over the last 20 to 25 days there have been very heavy clashes on the Syrian side. We have felt the effects of these in Akçakale," Labor Minister Faruk Çelik, an MP for the province where Akçakale is located, told parliament.

In April, Turkey reported an incident to the United Nations in which at least five people, including two Turkish officials, were wounded when cross-border gunfire struck a Syrian refugee camp in Kilis, further west along the frontier.

Turkey beefed up its troop presence and air defences along its 900-km (560-mile) border after Syria shot down a Turkish reconnaissance jet in June. But residents in Akcakale said there was still not enough security.

"People here are rising up, there is no security. People were chanting for the local governors to resign," local resident İbrahim Halil Arslan told CNN Turk television.

"Everybody here is so anxious. We keep our children locked at home, and we are trying to live under this psychological pressure," he said.

Washington sees Turkey as the pivotal player in backing Syria's opposition and planning for the post-Assad era. But Ankara has found itself increasingly isolated and frustrated by a lack of international consensus on how to end the conflict.

Turkey is also sheltering more than 90,000 refugees from Syria and fears a mass influx similar to the flight of half a million Iraqi Kurds into Turkey after the 1991 Gulf War.