At least 10 dead in suicide car bomb attack in Syria's Raqqa - SOHR

At least ten people were killed and 20 wounded on Saturday in a suicide car bomb attack in Raqqa, a former Daesh stronghold in north Syria, a Britain-based rights watchdog said.

The explosion claimed the lives of five civilians and five militants of the US-backed PYD/YPG-dominated SDF militia who were battling Daesh in Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

The attack, for which no one has claimed responsibility, was preceded by a bomb explosion that left several people wounded in another part of the city frequently targeted by the Daesh group, said the SOHR.

"The car bomb attack was targeting an SDF position," SOHR director Rami Abdel Rahmane told AFP. The explosion took place at the al Naim square where Deash had carried out beheadings when it was in control of the city.

The YPG is the Syrian offshoot of the PKK terrorist organisation. In its 30-year terror campaign against the Turkish state more than 40,000 people, including women and children, have been killed.
Turkey, the US and the EU recognise the PKK as a terrorist organisation.

On April 9, a double bombing claimed by Daesh killed 13 people, mostly civilians, in the terrorist group's former bastion.

Daesh seized large swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

The US-backed assault to drive Daesh from its Syrian capital Raqqa in 2017 killed "more than 1,600 civilians," 10 times the toll the coalition itself has acknowledged, Amnesty International and the monitoring group Airwars said earlier in April this year.

Several offensives with US-led coalition backing chipped away at the terrorist groups' so-called "caliphate" until it was declared eliminated on March 23.

Ambushes and hit-and-run attacks have continued in both countries, with Daesh militants still scattered in the Syrian desert.