Attackers have killed one Turkish soldier and wounded two in the partitioned Idlib Province in northwest Syria.

The Turkish Defense Ministry said an armored ambulance was attacked. It said fire was returned, but did not identify the assailants or the location of the incident.

On May 27, another Turkish soldier was slain by an explosion on a key highway that was part of a March 5 ceasefire agreement between Turkey and Russia.

The deal paused an 11-month Russian-regime offensive that seized almost all of northern Hama Province and part of southern and eastern Idlib, including the M5 Damascus-to-Aleppo motorway and the M4 cross-Idlib highway. The offensive killed about 2,000 civilians, wounded thousands, and displaced more than one million.

Under the deal, Turkish and Russian forces are patrolling a corridor along the M4. However, the patrols have been sharply limited in their range by protests.

See Syria Daily, March 24: Protests Block Turkish and Russian Patrols in Idlib

Turkey sent troops into northwest Syria in August 2016. Initially they supported rebels in the removal of the Islamic State from the area. In early 2018 an offensive took most of the Kurdish canton of Afrin.

In the weeks before the ceasefire, the Turkish military finally confronted pro-Assad forces, striking hundreds of targets from the air and on the ground. Turkey is also trying to curb the jihadist bloc Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which had controlled much of Idlib since defeating rebel factions in 2017.