Six children were among the victims of intense shelling of Dahla in Deir Ezzor province DAMASCUS: Bombardment by pro-Iranian groups supporting the Syrian government killed 11 civilians in an eastern village under the control of Kurdish-led forces, a war monitor said Friday. Six children were among the victims of intense shelling of Dahla in Deir Ezzor province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Fighting erupted on Wednesday when pro-Iranian fighters attacked Kurdish-held areas, according to the Britain-based monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria. The Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces also reported 11 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in Dahla. The US-backed SDF spearheaded the offensive that defeated the Islamic State jihadist group’s self-declared caliphate in Syria in 2019. Arab-majority Deir Ezzor province, a resource-rich region which borders Iraq, is bisected by the Euphrates river and is home to dozens of local tribal communities, some of whose fighters joined the SDF in its battle against IS. Iran has provided military support to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces through more than a decade of civil war. The United States has around 900 troops in Syria as part of an anti-jihadist coalition. Syria’s civil war has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions since it began in 2011 with the repression of anti-government protests. It spiralled into a complex conflict drawing in foreign armies and jihadists.