A car bomb killed at least 13 people in a Turkish-held border town in northeast Syria yesterday.
The bombing ripped through Tal Abyad, one of several once Kurdish-controlled towns seized by Turkey last month in a deadly cross-border offensive.
The blast came despite a truce last week to halt a Turkish assault that began on October 9 and sparked the latest humanitarian disaster of Syria’s eight-year civil war.
Yesterday, an AFP correspondent in Tal Abyad saw the skeletons of two motorbikes ablaze in the middle of a rubble-strewn street.
A group of men carried the severely burnt body of a victim onto the back of a pickup truck, as a veiled young woman stood aghast by the side of the street.
Turkey’s defence ministry said 13 civilians were killed in the attack, which it blamed on Kurdish fighters.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, reported 14 people — pro-Ankara fighters and civilians — had been killed in the explosion.
The truce deal signed last week between Ankara and Moscow to end the Turkish offensive demands Kurdish fighters withdraw from the border.
It hands a 120-kilometre-long stretch of border land including Tal Abyad over to Turkey, and provides for joint Russian-Turkish patrols along other parts of the frontier.
The first of those started on Friday.
Ankara views Syrian Kurdish fighters as “terrorists”, and wants to expel them from areas along its southern border.
But Turkey also hopes to resettle there some of the 3.6mn Syrian refugees it hosts on its own soil.
On Friday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the United Nations would study Ankara’s plans for repatriation.
Yesterday, US troops visited Kurdish forces in Qamishli in the second such spotting of American forces in northeast Syria since a shock pullout announcement last month triggered the Turkish attack.
Beige-coloured armoured vehicles flying the American flag pulled up at the headquarters of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the de-facto army of Syria’s Kurds.
The SDF have been a key US ally in fighting the Islamic State group, backed by air strikes by a US-led coalition.
A source who attended a meeting with the Americans yesterday said they wanted to return to set up a military post in Qamishli.
The coalition declined to comment specifically on yesterday’s visit, but said the alliance continued to withdraw forces from northern Syria, redeploying some troops to oil-rich eastern Syria.
In an interview published Saturday, SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Abdi said he distrusted both the Syrian government and Russia, but had no other choice but to work with them.
“We have no confidence, but it’s not possible to solve Syria’s problems without using the political path. We must negotiate,” he told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper. The SDF expelled IS militants from their last patch of territory in Syria in March.
But the extremists continue to claim deadly attacks in SDF-held areas, and this week they announced they had a new leader after their former chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a US raid.
After years of war against IS, the SDF guard around 12,000 suspected militant fighters in overcrowded jails. The Turkish offensive last month sparked international alarm that extremists would escape from jail and regroup, with the United States admitting around 100 had already taken flight.
Syria’s war has spiralled into a complex conflict involving word powers since it started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
Turkey-backed Syrian fighters inspect the site of a car bomb explosion in the northern Syrian town of Tal Abyad, on the border, yesterday.
