Car bomb kills nine in northern Syria

A car bomb killed nine people including four civilians in a Turkish-held border town in northern Syria yesterday, a Britain-based war monitor said.
Two children were among those killed in Tal Abyad, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing.
But Ankara’s defence ministry in a statement blamed Kurdish forces who controlled the town before Turkish troops and proxy fighters overran it last month.
An AFP photographer saw smoke billow from the twisted burnt remains of a pick-up truck inside the town, and a bright red blood stain on the road nearby.
Pro-Turkey fighters and men in civilian clothes carried away human remains in a waterproof cover, he said.
The area has been shaken by repeated such bombings since Turkish troops carried out a cross-border operation last month.
The Turkish invasion against Kurdish-controlled areas saw Ankara’s fighters seize a strip of land roughly 120 kilometres long and 30 kilometres deep on the Syrian side of the border.
The operation launched on October 9 displaced tens of thousands and left dozens of civilians dead, and forced Kurdish forces to retreat from some key towns. On November 10, Turkey blamed Kurdish fighters for another bombing that took the lives of eight people in the village of Suluk southeast of Tal Abyad. A week earlier, another car bomb killed 13 people in Tal Abyad, according to the Observatory. Syria’s Kurds have been a key ally of the US in fighting the Islamic State  group in Syria, but Turkey sees them as “terrorists” linked to a Kurdish insurgency at home.
Kurdish-led Syrian forces expelled IS from its last patch of land in March, but the militants have continued to claim deadly attacks.