Child among five killed in pro-Turkey north Syria car bomb

A car bomb in the Turkish-controlled region of Afrin in northern Syria Saturday killed five people including a child, a British-based war monitor said.

The car, which contained explosives, blew up in a neighbourhood where workshops are located, killing the child, three other civilians and an unidentified person, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said the death toll could rise as 15 other people were wounded, some of them in critical condition.

Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies grabbed the region of Afrin from Kurdish fighters in 2018.

Afrin and other areas in northern Syria under Turkish control are regularly rocked by such bombings.

There is usually no claim for them, although Turkey routinely blames Kurdish fighters it accuses of being “terrorists” linked to its outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

In early January, another explosives-rigged vehicle killed one civilian in the town of Jindires in the Afrin region. The same day, a car bomb near a vegetable market in the Turkish-held border town of Ras al-Ain killed five people including two children.

In November, a car bomb went off near a bakery in Afrin, killing three people and wounding 16 others.

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

It has evolved into a complex conflict involving jihadists and foreign powers including Turkey, which has grabbed swathes of Syrian territory along its southern border during several military campaigns.

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