Daesh car bomb kills 5 in northeast Syria: Monitor

AL QAHTANIYA: A car bombing claimed by the Daesh killed five people, including three children, in a Kurdish-held town in northeast Syria on Wednesday, a war monitor said.

The explosive-rigged vehicle detonated in Al Qahtaniya, a town in Hasakeh province, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britainbased monitor. Hoker Arafat, a security official, said the bomb was detonated remotely in front of the town post office.

“Three children were killed in the bombing because it was very close to a primary school,” he said. A member of the local security forces was wounded in the atack, he added.

State news agency SANA also reported the bombing, saying it killed several people, including children. Daesh claimed the atack on its Telegram channel. The extremist group routinely claims atacks in northeast Syria, despite its territorial defeat earlier this year. Such atacks have included arson against wheat fields and deadly car bombs.

Daesh maintains a presence in the country’s vast Badia desert, as well as in areas controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s northeast and east.

The SDF, backed by the war planes of a Usled coalition, announced the end of Daesh selfproclaimed “caliphate” in March in the village of Baghouz, in Syria’s far east.

The country’s war has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

Pro-government forces and opposition fighters exchanged fire in northwest Syria on Tuesday, killing seven civilians, a war monitor said, ater Damascus scrapped a ceasefire.

A Friday truce was supposed to protect three million people living in the Idlib region ater three months of deadly bombardment.

But militants running the region on Saturday refused to comply with a key condition to that truce, declaring they would never withdraw from a planned buffer zone around the area.

On Monday, Damascus declared the truce over, accusing its opponents of attacking civilian areas and bombarding an air base of its ally Russia.