A fire and riot broke out in a prison in the northern Syrian town of Kobani on Saturday, killing at least seven people, according to state media. The SANA news agency reported that the blaze began when inmates at the Kobani prison rioted amid tensions that had escalated in the town the previous day between Kurdish and Arab residents. Although Syrian government forces recently entered Kobani, a town on the border with Turkey, the prison remains under the control of Kurdish fighters. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, stated that the riots were sparked by plans to transfer some inmates to a prison in Aleppo, a city in northern Syria. Kobani, which was under siege by the Islamic State group a decade ago, served as a staging ground for a U.S.-backed Kurdish offensive that concluded with the extremists losing their last territorial hold in 2019. On Friday, riots erupted in Kobani after Kurds accused Arabs of killing a Kurdish man. Tensions between the Kurdish minority and the central government remain high, despite recent efforts to bring northeastern Syria under the authority of the government in Damascus. In late August, the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a U.S.-backed group led by Kurds, announced the official dissolution of the organization, which once governed a de facto autonomous zone in Syria’s northeast.