A car bomb attack in the Tel Halaf village west of the Kurdish city of Serêkaniye (Ras al-Ayn), the Turkish-controlled region of Syrian Kurdistan, the Kurdish region in northern Syria (Rojava), November 26, 2019. Photo: ANF
ISTANBUL,— A car bomb killed at least 17 people and wounded 20 others in the Turkish-controlled region of Syrian Kurdistan, the Kurdish region in northern Syria, on Tuesday, Turkey’s defence ministry said.
The attack took place in the Tel Halaf village west of the Kurdish city of Serêkaniye (Ras al-Ayn), which is now controlled by the Turkish military after its offensive in October, the ministry said on its official Twitter account.
Several vehicles were reduced to charred shells by the blast at a village market, images from the scene showed.
It blamed the attack on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara accuses of being the Syrian offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has waged an insurgency against Turkey since 1984.
“The PKK/YPG terror group continues its car bombings aimed at civilians. The child murderers this time detonated a car bomb in Tal Halaf village west of Ras al-Ayn, killing 17 people and wounding more than 20,” the defence ministry said on Twitter.
Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the attack but gave a lower toll, saying 11 people — including at least three civilians — had been killed.
But it said the death toll is likely to climb due to the severity of some of the injuries suffered.
Turkish forces and their Arab proxies — former Syrian rebels hired as a ground force by Ankara — launched an offensive against Kurdish forces, the autonomous Kurdish administration’s de facto army, in Syrian Kurdistan on October 9, 2019
The military action came after US President Donald Trump ordered his troops to withdraw in a move that observers condemned as a betrayal of their Kurdish partners in the war against the Islamic State group in Syria.
In its operation, Turkey secured a strip of land in northern Syria after signing separate deals with the US and Russia.
Ankara says it wants to establish a “safe zone” in which to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it hosts on its soil.
The Kurds argue that Turkey’s goal of a “safe zone” is to weaken the Kurdish presence in Syrian Kurdistan by modifying the demographics of the area with the return of mostly Islamic Sunni Arab refugees.
Syria’s Kurds have established a semi-autonomous region in northeastern Syria during the country’s eight-year war.
In 2013, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD — the political branch of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) — has established three autonomous Cantons of Jazeera, Kobani and Afrin and a Kurdish government across Syrian Kurdistan in 2013. On March 17, 2016, Kurdish and Arab authorities announced the creation of a “federal region” made up of those semi-autonomous regions in Syrian Kurdistan.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
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