Photo: Xinhua

 

A car bomb killed at least 13 people in a Turkish-held border town in northeast Syria on Saturday, as thousands of Kurds in the wider region protested against "Turkish occupation."

The bombing ripped through Tal Abyad, one of several once Kurdish-controlled towns seized by Turkey last month in a deadly cross-border offensive.

The blast came despite a truce in the previous week to halt the Turkish assault that began on October 9 and sparked the latest humanitarian disaster of Syria's eight-year war.

On Saturday, an AFP correspondent in Tal Abyad saw the remains of two motorbikes ablaze in the middle of a rubble-­strewn street.

A group of men carried the severely burnt body of a victim onto the back of a pickup truck, as a veiled young woman stood aghast by the side of the street.

Turkey's defense ministry said 13 civilians were killed in the attack, which it blamed on Kurdish fighters. 

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, reported 14 people - pro-Ankara fighters and civilians - had been killed in the explosion.

"To displace true owners of the land and to settle Syrian refugees in Turkey to their homes in NE Syria, Turkish army and its proxies are now creating chaos in Til Abyad by explosions targeting civilians," Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces tweeted.

"Turkey is responsible for civilian casualties in the region it controls."

Meanwhile, in the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli, thousands of Syrian Kurds marched in the streets to protest what they view as a Turkish invasion.

"No to Turkish occupation," they cried, brandishing flags of their once semiautonomous ­region and its fighters.

In the German capital Berlin, the police said around 1,000 people protested to "stop the war" against the Kurds, while hundreds in Paris called for sanctions against Turkey.

The truce deal signed between Ankara and Moscow demands Kurdish fighters withdraw from the border.

It hands a 120-kilometer-long stretch of border land including Tal Abyad over to Turkey, and provides for joint Russian-Turkish patrols along other parts of the frontier - the first of which started Friday.

Ankara views Syrian Kurdish fighters as "terrorists," and wants to expel them from areas along its southern border.

But Turkey also hopes to resettle there some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it hosts on its own soil.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday told Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the UN would study Ankara's plans for repatriation.