Victims of a massive truck bomb are evacuated from a busy street in Afrin, Syria on April 28, 2020. (Credit: Unknown)
A fuel truck rigged with a grenade exploded in a busy market district of the northeast Syrian city of Afrin on Tuesday, killing at least 46 people, including 11 children. At least 50 were injured, many of them critically. The blast was timed with the busiest hour of the day in this city of a half-million people, when hundreds of people were shopping in the area in preparation to break the daily Ramadan fast.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, although Turkish authorities claimed to have made an arrest and blamed the Kurdish-led YPG militia. The Turkish army and their Syrian Islamist militias invaded the Afrin region in January, 2018, pushing back the YPG to their current positions at the Euphrates River.
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Turkey presented no evidence for the allegation, and there is no precedent for Kurdish terrorist attacks in Syria. Kurdish leaders instead insisted that the bombing was a result of infighting between different Islamist militia groups, who both jockey for power in Syria as well as intimidate minority populations with violence. Afrin is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse cities in Syria, where Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and Armenians lived side-by-side in peace before the Turkish invasion in 2018.
The Kurdish YPG makes up the largest component of the diverse Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an umbrella organization for different Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian militias who united together to fight the expansion of the ISIS caliphate in 2016. The SDF became the leading partner of the US-led Coalition in Syria in 2016 as a result of both their political and religious moderation, as well as their tenacity against jihadist extremism. SDF commander Mazloum Abdi published a statement on Twitter condemning the Afrin attack.
