A twin bombing has struck a crowd in a predominantly Kurdish town in northern Syria, killing 44 people and wounding dozens more, Syria’s state-run news agency and Kurdish media have reported.
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Earlier reports said that 55 people were killed and more than 160 wounded in what activists said was a powerful blast that rocked Qamishli, which is near the Turkish border.
The attack was initially believed to be a double bombing, but sources in the city and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights subsequently said the initial attack caused a gas tank to detonate.
According to a UK-based monitoring group, the so-called Islamic State (IS) has assumed responsibility for the attack in the Hassakeh province, near the Turkish border. He said the blasts had levelled several buildings to the ground and many people were trapped under the rubble.
It showed footage from the scene of the blast, with smoke rising from buildings and rubble from the blasts.
The IS-linked Amaq agency reported that a suicide truck bomber hit Kurdish forces in Qamishli, without explicitly claiming the attack as an IS operation.
People in Syria watch where the attack took place in horror, after 44 casualties have been confirmed so far by authorities in the city of Qamishli.
The attacks comes as fighting intensifies between the YPG and the extremist organization, with the former capturing large areas of territory from the Islamic State group in northeastern Syria.
There’s also a significant presence of the Kurdish-U.S backed democratic forces that are fighting on the northern side of the country against the Islamic State.
In a separate development, Syrian forces besieging rebel-held eastern Aleppo city called on anyone with weapons there to lay down their arms, announcing it had severed all supply routes. In July, an Islamic State suicide bomb killed at least 16 people in Hasaka.
The bomb hit near a Kurdish military headquarters, possibly targeted because the US has backed Peshmerga fighters against ISIS in northern Syria.
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Abdel Rahman told dpa earlier a auto bomb targeted the Justice Department and Kurdish internal security force in the town, which is located in al-Hasaka province.
