
FILE PHOTO. Aftermath of a car bomb explosion in Jub al Barazi east of al-Bab. ©REUTERS / Khalil Ashawi
The deadly explosion went off near a bus terminal on Saturday, causing the deaths and significant damage in the area. A video published by an Al Jazeera correspondent showed a chaotic scene with multiple small fires and what appears to be a large pool of blood on the ground.
The Turkish Defence Ministry has accused the “inhumane and uncivilised” Kurdish YPG militias for the bombing, saying the tactics showed that they were not different from the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). The ministry wouldn’t immediately explain how it attributed the responsibility.
Ankara considers the Syrian Kurdish militia terrorists and an extension of the PKK, the Turkey-based force that has fought a decades-long guerrilla war against the Turkish government.
Al-Bab is located in the Aleppo governorate some 30 km south of Syria’s border with Turkey and has remained under Turkish control since late 2016. Ankara-backed militias seized the city after defeating IS jihadists, who had captured it in 2013.
A bomb attack killed 10 people in the northern Syrian town of Al-Bab near the Turkish border on Saturday, Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency said.pic.twitter.com/BLmnmHsjXw http://shorturl.at/aNQ07
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That Turkish takeover denied the Kurdish militias a chance to seize the city for themselves, which would otherwise have connected Kurdish-controlled areas to the east and to the west of the city.
I think that the region just north of Haleb has been disputed for decades. I was talking to a friend a while ago and he’d cycled through that region in the late 1980s, he said people he met were claiming not to be Syrian. They weren’t Kurdish so could well have been pro Turkish separatists.
It is likely that the Turkish Kurds and the Turkish are fighting in that region, as in the event of a defeat for Syria they both have been promised the territory.
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