Turkish troops and allied rebels groups seized the northern Syrian city of Afrin in March 2018 after a two-month air and ground offensive against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units dubbed operation “Olive Branch” © AFP/File / DELIL SOULEIMAN
Beirut, Lebanon, Jan 20 – A bomb blast in a bus killed three civilians Sunday in the northern Syrian city of Afrin on the first anniversary of a Turkish attack on the Kurdish-majority region, a war monitor said.
Nine other people, including fighters, were wounded in the explosion, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.
Turkish troops and allied rebel groups seized the Afrin region from Kurdish forces in March last year after a two-month air and ground offensive.
“The explosion is the result of a bomb that was placed in a bus in the centre of Afrin,” Abdel Rahman said.
It was not immediately clear who was behind the blast, the second to rock Afrin since December 16 when a car bomb killed at least nine people, including five civilians, near a pro-Turkey rebel post in the city.
That explosion came after Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan threatened to launch a new offensive against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria.
Turkey accuses the YPG of being “terrorists”, but the Kurdish militia also forms the backbone of a US-backed alliance fighting the Islamic State group in Syria.
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