A suicide bombing killed 48 people, among them women and children, Wednesday in northern Syria, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
A truck bomb exploded near buildings belonging to a Kurdish security agency and other governmental departments in the city of Qamishli near the border with Turkey, CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh reported. The observatory said 140 people were hurt.
ISIS claimed responsibility and said one of its members drove a truck rigged with explosives to reach the Kurdish administrative complex where defense, interior and military recruiting departments operated. Kurdish officials are trying to learn how ISIS was able to get so much explosives into their stronghold.
ISIS said the suicide operation was a “response to the crimes committed by the coalition warplanes against the vulnerable people of men, women and children in Manbij City.”
Human rights groups said last week that U.S.-led airstrikes in and around the ISIS-controlled city of Manbij have killed more than 100 and wounded dozens more since June.
The Manbij area is the last large tract of land along Syria’s northern border with Turkey under ISIS control, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Video from Qamishli showed residents digging through rubble searching for survivors and women wailing from apartments where the blast had blown off front walls.
The city is under joint control of the Syrian-based Kurdish rebels — the People’s Protection Units, or YPG — and the Syrian regime.
The terror group has claimed responsibility for a spate of terror attacks recently, including one that killed at least 21 people this week in Baghdad.
Earlier this month, the deadliest terror attack in Baghdad in years killed nearly 300 people when a suicide truck bomb plowed into a busy shopping district.
On Tuesday, the ISIS-linked news agency said the terror group’s “soldiers” were behind a church attack in northern France that killed a Catholic priest. One of the two suspects in the attack was known to anti-terror authorities after attempting a trip to Syria, a French anti-terrorism prosecutor said Tuesday.
