Car Bomb Kills Eight, Injures 20 In Syria

A car bomb in Syria killed eight people and wounded more than 20 on Sunday in the sector in the north of the country currently under Turkey’s control, Ankara said.

“Eight civilians lost their lives and more than 20 were wounded in an attack by a booby-trapped vehicle,” a defence ministry statement said.

The statement blamed the attack on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, viewed by Ankara as an offshoot of the Kurdish PKK, which has fought an insurgency inside Turkey for the past 35 years.

But the force was until recently backed by Washington in the US fight against jihadist fighters in Syria.

 

The attack happened in Suluk, a village about 20 kilometres (12 miles) southeast of the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad, according to Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Observatory gave a lower death toll, saying five people were killed and 13 wounded, with both civilians and fighters among the dead. It did not say who carried out the attack.

Turkish forces and their proxies — former Syrian rebels hired as a ground force by Ankara — launched a deadly offensive against Kurdish forces in Syria on October 9.

They acted days after US President Donald Trump ordered his troops to withdraw in a move that observers condemned as a betrayal of their Kurdish partners in the war against the Islamic State group in Syria.

The Turkish push was aimed at seizing a strip of land roughly 30 kilometres deep along the 440-kilometre border between the two countries.