The blast in the Syrian
town of Jarablus shook windows about a kilometer away in the Turkish
village of Karkamis, said Selami Yilmaz, a Karkamis resident.
"We don't even have
enough ambulances to keep up with how many wounded are coming across,"
Yilmaz told CNN. He said he has lent his car to authorities to help get
the wounded to hospitals.
The London-based Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights said the car bomb exploded near a cultural
center controlled by fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
That al Qaeda-linked force has taken control of much of northern Syria
amid that country's bloody civil war. The Syrian Observatory said heavy
clashes were still going on in Jarablus.
ISIS, which has also
taken control of parts of western Iraq, has attempted to impose strict
Islamic law in towns where it holds sway. Rebel troops who had been
battling forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched an
effort to push back the Islamists two weeks ago, but that offensive
appears to have faltered after hundreds of deaths on both sides,
observers report.
Yilmaz said the Free
Syrian Army, the leading Western-backed rebel force, has been losing
ground in Jarablus. Dozens of its fighters have fled amid intense
fighting, while wounded FSA troops have been pouring across the border
into Turkey for treatment.
Human rights groups
reported 183 deaths across Syria on Tuesday alone, all but 40 of them
combatants on one side or the other. Heavy fighting between ISIS and
rebel factions was under way around Aleppo, Syria's largest city, as
well as the ISIS-held city of Raqqa and the border town of Saraqeb,
where a Belgian man who had become the regional ISIS "emir" was among
the dead, the Syrian Observatory reported.
The group also said ISIS
executed two civilians from a Kurdish village last week after they left
their homes to buy bread in a nearby city. Their bodies were found with
their hands tied behind their backs "and marks from torture evident on
their bodies," the London-based organization reported.
CNN cannot independently
verify daily death tolls, but the United Nations has said more than
100,000 people have been killed in Syria since the revolt against
al-Assad began in 2011.
U.S. announces $380 million in humanitarian assistance for Syria
No comments:
Post a Comment