Car bomb in north Syria kills 14, mostly civilians

BEIRUT — A car bomb on Tuesday killed 14 people, mostly civilians, in the Turkish-controlled town of Al Bab in northern Syria, a war monitor said.

The explosion near a bus station in the town also wounded at least 40 people, some of them seriously, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

Turkey and its Syrian proxies control several pockets of territory on Syria's side of the border following three military incursions since 2016.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the car bombing, but there has been a string of attacks in Al Bab since its capture by Turkish troops from the Daesh terror group in 2017.

The town, 40 kilometres northeast of Syria’s second city Aleppo, was one of the western-most strongholds of the extremists’ self-styled territorial “caliphate”.

US-backed Kurdish forces seized the last scrap of the statelet from the extremists in eastern Syria in March last year.