A milestone in Syria
▶ North Syrian town struck for third time in four days as rebel groups backed by Turkey vie for control of the area
Members of the Syrian Democratic Forces in Hajin, in the Deir Ezzor province of east Syria. At the weekend, the Kurdish-led group routed ISIS from the town, on the east bank of the Euphrates, in what is considered a milestone in a costly US-backed operation to eradicate the extremists from eastern Syria.
A car bombing struck a busy market in the northern Syrian town of Afrin yesterday, killing at least eight people and wounding at least a dozen more.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the explosion in the Al Hal market occurred near the offices of a Turkey-backed Syrian rebel group.
The number of casualties from the attack is expected to rise as victims succumb to critical wounds, the monitor said.
The explosion is at least the third to hit Afrin in less than a week.
On Friday, four members of the Turkey-backed Islamic Front rebel group were killed in a separate explosion, according to the Observatory. Another explosion on Thursday killed four people, including at least one rebel fighter.
A picture posted by the activist-run Zaman Al Wasel media outlet on Twitter showed the remains of a charred vehicle at the site of yesterday’s blast.
Another video posted on social media networks showed men carrying what appeared to be a wounded man out of the market. The video also showed torched vehicles and destroyed stalls.
It was not clear who was behind the attack but the area has been the site of confrontations in recent months between Turkey-backed rebel groups vying for control over Afrin.
The explosion comes at a time of increased tension between Ankara and Syria’s Kurds after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week threatened to launch a new offensive on Kurdish-held regions in Syria overlooking the Turkish border.
The region of Afrin was previously controlled by Kurdish groups, who liberated the area from ISIS in 2016.
But in March this year, Turkish troops and Ankara-backed Syrian rebels pushed fighters with the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) from the area.
The Turkish defence ministry said a Turkish soldier was killed on Thursday in Afrin after being shot by members of the YPG from the nearby city of Tal Rifaat, east of Afrin.
Separately, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a conference in Qatar yesterday that Turkey and other world powers would consider working with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad if he won a democratic election.
“If it is a democratic election, and if it is a credible one then everybody should consider [working with him],” he said.
Turkey supported the opposition to Assad in the Syrian civil war that broke out in 2011 and continues to support rebel fighters who control part of north-west Syria.
Mr Assad won re-election in June 2014, securing 88.7 per cent support in a vote that the opposition derided as a charade, saying that he faced no credible rival candidate and that no poll held during a civil war could be credible.
On Saturday, meanwhile, Agence France-Presse reported that US-led coalition forces destroyed an ISIS command centre in a mosque in the Syrian border town of Hajin.
The US announcement came as Kurdish-led forces mopped up the final remnants of ISIS jihadists in Hajin, the largest settlement in what is the last pocket of territory controlled by the extremists.
More than 16 “heavily armed” ISIS fighters were a “command and control node” at the mosque when it was destroyed by a “precision strike”, according to the Combined Joint Task Force.
The extremists, who were all killed in the strike, were using the mosque to “command attacks against coalition partners”, it said.
ISIS “continues to use protected structures to launch attacks against our coalition partners with complete disregard for the infrastructure and innocent human lives”, the task force said.
Fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces on Friday secured Hajin after weeks of heavy fighting, the Observatory said.
The town is located in eastern Syria about 30 kilometres from the border with Iraq.
The area is sometimes referred to as the “Hajin pocket”, the last rump of a once-sprawling caliphate the group proclaimed in 2014 after it overran large areas of Syria and Iraq.
On Friday, four members of the Turkey-backed Islamic Front rebel group were killed in a separate explosion