A suicide bomber attacked Turkish-backed rebels outside the Syrian town of Al-Bab Friday, killing 51 people in a major blow just hours after they hailed its capture from the Islamic State group. The bomber blew up a vehicle packed with explosives outside a rebel command centre in the village of Susian, eight kilometres (five miles) northeast of Al-Bab, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The blast devastated the twin command posts and also seriously wounded a large number of fighters, the Britain-based monitoring group said. It said the majority of those killed were civilians. There was no immediate claim for the attack, but rebels blamed it on IS, which had put up fierce resistance in Al-Bab for weeks. "(Abu Bakr) al-Baghdadi's dogs could not bear their huge loss, and their suicide bombers have begun to take revenge," said field commander Abu Jaafar of the Mutasem Brigades.
He said rebel fighters, Turkish soldiers, and civilians from Al-Bab had called a meeting in Susian "to organise a security apparatus and set a plan for rebuilding Al-Bab". "This information reached the (IS) sleeper cells, which prepared a car bomb" that detonated at Susian around 0800 am (0600 GMT), he told AFP. Abu Jaafar, who was near Susian at the time of the attack, said hospitals in the area were full of wounded. Separately, two Turkish soldiers were killed in a suicide attack in Al-Bab on Friday as they were carrying out road checks, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said. The strategic town, just 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of the Turkish border, was the jihadists' last stronghold in the northern Syrian province of Aleppo.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.