Suicide attack at Susian, near Al Bab, kills 51

Monitoring group says victims were mostly civilians

AL BAB // An ISIL-claimed suicide attack killed at least 51 people near the Syrian town of Al Bab yesterday, hours after it was seized from the extremists by Turkish-backed rebels.

Most of those killed in the car bomb were civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition monitoring group.

The assault targeted twin command posts at a rebel base in Susian, a village about eight kilometres from Al Bab, the Observatory said.

Rebel field commander Abu Jaafar said fighters, Turkish soldiers and civilians had gathered at Susian for an overnight meeting “to organise a security apparatus and set a plan for rebuilding Al Bab”.

“This information reached the [ISIL] sleeper cells, which prepared a car bomb” that detonated in Susian about 8am local time, he said.

Abu Jaafar, who was near Susian at the time of the attack, said hospitals in the area were full of the wounded.

“[ ISIL leader Abu Bakr] Al Baghdadi’s dogs could not bear their huge loss, and their suicide bombers have begun to take revenge,” he said.

Separately, two Turkish soldiers were killed in a suicide attack in Al Bab as they were carrying out road checks, Turkish prime minister Binali Yildirim said.

The strategic town, 25 kilometres south of the Turkish border, was ISIL’s last stronghold in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo before it was fully taken by the Turkish-backed rebels yesterday.

The attack near Al Bab came as the United Nations tried to get a new round of Syrian peace talks off the ground in Geneva, but there were few signs of progress.

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, who brought rival regime and opposition delegates symbolically together late on Thursday, held separate meetings with the two sides yesterday to hammer out the format for the meetings. But there appeared to be no discussion of substance, either with the UN and certainly not between the rival parties themselves.

“We discussed issues relating to the format of the talks exclusively,” said the head of the Syrian government delegation, Bashar Al Jaafari, after meeting Mr de Mistura.

He said that Mr de Mistura had given them a paper, which, according to a source close to the talks, covered three areas for discussion: transition in Syria; a constitution; and elections.

Political transition, which is part of the UN resolution managing the Geneva talks, is the matter at the heart of the debate.

But it has different meanings for Damascus and its Russian and Iranian allies on one side, and the Syrian opposition on the other.

UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said he was “encouraged the Syrians sat together in the same room”.

During talks in Geneva last year, the rivals never sat down at the same table, instead leaving Mr de Mistura to shuttle between them.

The rebels are in a significantly weaker position since the previous UN- sponsored talks, held in April. The army recaptured the rebel bastion of east Aleppo, while Washington, once staunchly opposed to Syrian president Bashar Al Assad, is reassessing every aspect of its Syrian policy under president Donald Trump.

Also yesterday, Russia said it would use its veto to block a proposed UN resolution drafted by the US, France and Britain that would impose sanctions on Syria for the use of chemical weapons.

Russian deputy ambassador Vladimir Safronkov said the measure was one-sided, based on “insufficient proof” and contradicted “the fundamental principle of presumption of innocence until the investigation is over”.

The draft resolution came after a UN- led investigation which concluded that the Syrian military had carried out at least three chlorine attacks on opposition-held villages in 2014 and 2015.

The joint panel of the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons also found that ISIL forces had deployed mustard gas in an attack in 2015.