A car bomb killed at least 13 people in a Turkish-held border town in northeast Syria on Saturday, as thousands of Kurds in the wider region protested against “Turkish occupation.”
The blast ripped through Tal Abyad, one of several once Kurdish-controlled towns seized by Turkey last month in a cross-border offensive.
The explosion came despite a truce last week to halt the Turkish assault that began on Oct. 9.
Photo: AP
A correspondent in Tal Abyad reported the remains 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.
The Turkish Ministry of Defense said that 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 that 14 people — pro-Ankara fighters and civilians — had been killed in the explosion.
“To displace true owners of the land and to settle Syrian refugees in Turkey to their homes in NE Syria, Turkish army and its proxies are now creating chaos in Til Abyad by explosions targeting civilians,” Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces tweeted. “Turkey is responsible for civilian casualties in the region it controls.”
Meanwhile, in the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli, thousands of Syrian Kurds marched in the streets to protest what they view as a Turkish invasion.
“No to Turkish occupation,” they cried, brandishing flags of their once semi-autonomous region and its fighters.
In the German capital, Berlin, the police said that about 1,000 people protested to “stop the war” against the Kurds, while hundreds in Paris called for sanctions against Turkey.
The truce agreement signed last week between Ankara and Moscow demands that Kurdish fighters withdraw from the border.
It hands a 120km 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 which started on Friday.
Ankara views Syrian Kurdish fighters as “terrorists” and wants to expel them from areas along its southern border.
Turkey also hopes to resettle there some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it hosts on its own soil.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the UN would study Ankara’s plans for repatriation.
The Turkish attack last month came after US President Donald Trump said he had ordered US troops to leave northern Syria.
On Saturday, US troops visited Kurdish forces in Qamishli in the second such spotting of its personnel northeastern Syria since that announcement.
Tan armored vehicles flying the US flag pulled up at the headquarters of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the de facto army of Syria’s Kurds.
The SDF have been a key US partner in fighting the Islamic State group, backed by airstrikes by a US-led coalition.
A source who attended a meeting with the US forces on Saturday said they wanted to return to set up a military post in Qamishli.
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