Car bomb kills seven in PYD-held northern Syrian city

By Khaled Suleyman

RAQQA, Syria

At least seven people were killed Tuesday morning -- and another 25 injured -- when a car bomb rocked the city of Tal Abyad, located in Syria’s Raqqa province on the border with Turkey, according to local sources.

Local sources told Anadolu Agency that an explosives-laden vehicle blew up outside the city’s labor union office.

Last year, the PYD (the Syrian arm of the terrorist PKK organization) captured Tal Abyad from the Daesh terrorist group, with air support provided by an international anti-Daesh coalition.

According to the same sources, a number of those injured in Wednesday’s blast -- for which no group has yet claimed responsibility -- were taken to hospitals in the neighboring Turkish province of Sanliurfa.

In the immediate wake of the bombing, the Turkish authorities sent several ambulances to Sanliurfa’s town of Akcakale near the Syrian border to help treat the injured.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-battered country, according to the UN.

However, the Syrian Center for Policy Research, an NGO, puts the total death toll from the six-year conflict at more than 470,000.