Nineteen killed in car bomb attack in Turkish-controlled Syrian city of Al-Bab

A car bomb on Tuesday killed at least 19 people in the Turkish-controlled town of Al-Bab in northern Syria, the Syrian Civil Defence said.

The explosion near a bus station in the town also wounded at least 75 people, some of them seriously, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.

The Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, said that the number of casualties was expected to increase.

Turkey and its allied Syrian militias control have controlled several pockets of territory on the Syrian side of the border ever 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 Islamic State (IS) group in 2017.

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

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"We condemn in the strongest terms these ongoing indiscriminate attacks on civilians," senior UN humanitarian official Mark Cutts wrote on Twitter after the latest bombing.

US-backed forces from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces seized IS’s last stronghold in eastern Syria in March 2019.

More than 500,000 people have been killed since the Syrian conflict started in 2011 with the brutal suppression of pro-democracy protests by the Assad regime.

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