A car bomb on Monday killed 15 people, mostly agricultural workers, in the northern Syrian city of Manbij where US-backed Kurdish forces are fighting Turkish-backed Syrian rebel groups, state media reported.
Citing White Helmet rescuers, SANA news agency said there had been a “massacre” on a local road, with “the explosion of a car bomb near a vehicle transporting agricultural workers” killing 14 women and one man.
The attack also wounded 15 women, some critically, SANA said, adding the toll could rise. There was no immediate claim of responsibility and it was the second such attack in recent days in war-ravaged Syria.
The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) and Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been intensified in fierce clashes since Syrian rebels toppled dictator Bashar al-Assad in December.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor reported on Saturday that four civilians were killed when a car bomb exploded “near a military position” in Manbij. At least ten Syrian rebels were also killed on the same day in and around Manbij by suspected SDF militants.Â
Turkey-backed forces in Syria’s north launched an offensive against the Kurdish-led, US-backed SDF in November, capturing several Kurdish-held enclaves in the north despite US efforts to broker a ceasefire.
With extensive US support, the SDF was a key part of the military campaign that ousted the Islamic State group (IS) from parts of Syria in 2019, with Syrian rebel groups also independently fighting and expelling the group.
But the main component of the SDF, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), is considered to be the Syrian wing of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Both Turkey and the United States have designated the PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil, as a terrorist group.
Syria’s new rulers have called on the SDF to hand over their weapons, rejecting demands for any kind of Kurdish self-rule, with the SDF controlling an Arab-majority area.
On 9 December, the Syrian interim government assumed control of Manbij when Turkey and the US struck a deal for SDF fighters to safely leave the Arab-majority city.
During the Syrian civil war, Manbij was initially liberated from the Assad regime by Syrian rebel forces before it was overrun by IS. The city then came under SDF control after the Kurdish-led force took the city from IS with the aid of US airstrikes.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces have allegedly withdrawn from Quneitra in the south of Syria, following weeks of occupying the area. The New Arab could not independently verify the claims.
Local sources claim that the Israeli military withdrew from the governorate building and the court building in the city of Al-Baath in Quneitra Governorate, and also carried out a partial withdrawal from the vicinity of Al-Mantara Dam and the town of Al-Qahtaniyah in the Quneitra countryside.
Israel began its occupation of parts of southern Syria hours after the fall of Assad in December, when its forces invaded the Golan Heights buffer zone and pushed into Quneitra and other parts of Syria in a move that is considered illegal under international law. It already illegally occupies parts of the Syrian Golan Heights.
(Agencies contributed to this report)
