A car bomb believed to have been deployed and detonated Saturday by YPG terrorists in the center of the northern Syrian town of Afrin claimed the lives of six civilians including a child.
The car, which contained explosives, blew up in a neighborhood where workshops are located during the afternoon rush hour on the first working day of the week. The blast killed a child, three other civilians and an unidentified person, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said in remarks carried by the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said the death toll could rise as 15 other people were wounded, some of them in critical condition.
Turkey's official Anadolu Agency (AA) put the death toll at six with 25 injuries, adding that the powerful blast was felt throughout the district.
AA reported that local security assesses that the attack was conducted by YPG terrorists, which were expelled from the region in March 2018 after the town was liberated by the Operation Olive Branch launched by the Turkish military and allied Syrian National Army (SNA) fighters.
Afrin and other districts under Turkish control are regularly targeted by the YPG, which seized control of large swathes of land in the northern parts of the war-torn country with the Assad regime's blessing when clashes intensified back in 2012.
In early January, another explosives-rigged vehicle killed one civilian in the town of Jindires in the Afrin region. The same day, a car bomb near a vegetable market in the Turkish-held border town of Ras al-Ain killed five people including two children.
In November, a car bomb went off near a bakery in Afrin, killing three people and wounding 16 others.
Ankara considers the YPG, which was deployed by the U.S.-led anti-Daesh coalition within the pretext of fighting the terrorist group on the ground, a grave national security threat.
Syria's war has killed more than 387,000 people and displaced millions since starting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-regime protests.
