Car bomb kills 15 in northern Syria in deadliest attack since Assad ouster

A car bomb killed at least 15 people in the northern Syrian city of Manbij on Monday, the second attack there in three days and Syria’s deadliest since Bashar al-Assad was toppled from power in December.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack in Manbij, located some 30 kilometres from the Turkish border. The civil defence rescue service identified the dead as 14 women and one man and said another 15 women were wounded.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) condemned the car bombing, accusing Turkey-backed factions of using such bombings and violence to intimidate local residents.

The victims were agricultural workers and the death toll was likely to increase, a civil defence official told Reuters.

Manbij has changed hands numerous times during Syria’s 13-year civil war, most recently in December when Turkish-backed groups captured it from the US-backed SDF, which is led by the Kurdish YPG militia.

The SDF had taken Manbij from the militant Islamic State group in 2016.

On Saturday, a car bomb in Manbij killed four civilians and wounded nine others, including children, the Syrian state news agency SANA reported.

Assad was ousted from power on December 8 after a lightning offensive by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, whose leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was declared Syria’s transitional president last week.