Car Bomb Kills 16 Including 3 Turkish Personnel in Syria
A car bomb killed 16 people including two
civilians and three Turkish personnel 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-kilometre (75-mile) 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 the Islamic State jihadist group 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.
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.
