Car bomb kills 16 including 3 Turkish personnel in NE Syria: monitor
A car bomb killed 16 people in the Turkish-held border town of Ras al-Ain in northeast Syria.
BEIRUT (AFP) - A car bomb killed 16 people including two civilians and three Turkish personnel Thursday at a checkpoint in the Turkish-held border town of Ras al-Ain in northeast Syria, a war monitor said.
The other 11 killed were local security forces or members of a Turkish-backed faction manning the checkpoint, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Twelve more were wounded, it said.
Turkey said two of its gendarmes had been killed and a further eight wounded.
Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies last year seized a 120-kilometre (75-mile) stretch of land inside the Syrian border from Kurdish forces, running from Ras al-Ain to Tal Abyad.
Such bombings are common in Ras al-Ain.
In July, the blast from an explosives-rigged motorbike ripped through a vegetable market there, killing at least eight people, including six civilians.
The Kurdish-led People s Protection Units (YPG), from whom the Turks and their allies seized the territory, played a key role in the US-backed fight against the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria.
But Ankara views them as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has waged a deadly insurgency in southeastern Turkey since 1984.
Syria s civil war has killed more than 387,000 people and displaced millions from their homes since erupting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
