Car bomb kills 16 including 3 Turkish personnel in NE Syria

A car bomb killed 16 people including two civilians and three Turkish personnel on Thursday at a checkpoint in the Turkish-held border town of Ras Al-Ain in northeast Syria, a war monitor said.

The other 11 killed were local security forces or members of a Turkish-backed faction manning the checkpoint, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Twelve more were wounded, it said.

Turkey said two of its gendarmes had been killed and a further eight wounded.

Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies last year seized a 120-km stretch of land inside the Syrian border from Kurdish forces, running from Ras Al-Ain to Tal Abyad. Such bombings are common in Ras Al-Ain.

In July, the blast from an explosives-rigged motorbike ripped through a vegetable market there, killing at least eight people, including six civilians.

The Kurdish-led People’s Protection Units (YPG), from whom the Turks and their allies seized the territory, played a key role in the US-backed fight against Daesh in Syria.

But Ankara views them as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has waged a deadly insurgency in southeastern Turkey since 1984.
In a separate incident, Daesh killed nine Iran-trained Syrian fighters in an attack on one of their positions in eastern Syria on Thursday, a war monitor said.
The Observatory said a Daesh sleeper cell carried out the dawn attack on the desert outpost outside the Euphrates Valley town of Al-Mayadeen.

Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman said the fighters killed were Syrians led and trained by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

At least two Daesh fighters were killed in ensuing clashes.

Since March 2019, intermittent fighting has killed more than 1,000 government troops and allied Iran-backed militiamen, most of them in sparsely populated areas of the Syrian Desert, the Observatory says.

More than 580 Daesh militants have also died, the monitor says.

Daesh overran large parts of Syria and Iraq and proclaimed a cross-border “caliphate” in 2014, before multiple offensives in the two countries led to its territorial defeat.

Syria’s civil war has killed more than 387,000 people and displaced millions from their homes since erupting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

The dead include more than 130,500 pro-government fighters, among them foreigners.