Men gather around damage from shelling of town of Al-Bab in northwest Syria, February 2, 2022 (Anadolu)


UPDATE, FEB 7:

Activists and the White Helmets civil defense tell the story of one of the victims of last Wednesday’s shelling of Al-Bab in Aleppo Province.

Islam was supposed to return to school on Sunday for the second semester. Instead, she is in a coma fighting for her life.


UPDATE, FEB 3:

The White Helmets civil defense reports mass casualties from strikes on Al-Bab in Aleppo Province.

The rescuers said the shelling was from an area where both the US-supported, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and Assad regime troops are present.


ORIGINAL ENTRY, JAN 18:

One person has been killed and six wounded in the latest car bombing near Azaz in northwest Syria.

The blast was in a market hall in Sajo village, home to civilians displaced by the Assad regime, near the Turkish border. The explosive was placed in a car purportedly distributing bread.

No group has taken responsibility, but Turkish officials have blamed the Syrian Kurdish militia YPG. Kurdish outlets cite “chaos…amid the inability of the controlling Turkish-backed armed opposition groups to control security”.

Azaz has been recurrently bombed since Turkey and anti-Assad fighters took over much of the Kurdish canton of Afrin, also in the northwest, in early 2018.

On July 19, car bombs in Afrin and Azaz killed five people and wounded 98.

Turkey considers the YPG as part of the Turkish Kurdish insurgency PKK. However, the militia is the leading faction in the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which removed the Islamic State from northeast Syria in operations between autumn 2015 and March 2019.