19 killed, 33 wounded in Syria car bomb blast
A car bomb killed 19 people, 13 of them civilians, in the Turkish-controlled town of Al-Bab in northern Syria on Saturday, a war monitor said.
The bomb, which struck a bus and taxi station in the town, also wounded 33 people, some of them seriously, the Britainbased Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
Turkey and its Syrian proxies control several pockets of territory on the Syrian side of the border as a result of successive incursions in 201617, 201 and 2019.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing but the Observatory said there had been persistent security incidents in the town since its capture by Turkish troops from the Islamic State group in February 2017.
The town, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) northeast of Syria’s second city Aleppo, was one of the westernmost strongholds of the jihadists’ self-styled “caliphate” which was finally eradicated by USbacked Kurdish forces in eastern Syria in March.
Turkey blamed the car bombing on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units ( PG) against whom it launched a new invasion further east last month.
Kurdish fighters “continue to target innocent civilians using the same methods as Daesh,” the defence ministry said on its official Twitter account using another acronym for IS.
There was no immediate reaction from the PG, seen by Ankara as a “terrorist offshoot” of the Kurdistan Workers Party which has fought an insurgency inside Turkey for the past 35 years. The latest Turkish invasion, which was aimed at creating a buffer zone the whole length of the border, sparked an outcry in the West because of the key role the PG played in the US-led campaign against IS.