The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

Blast at Syria refugee camp leaves 5 dead

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An explosion yesterday, believed to have been caused by a car bomb, tore through a Syrian refugee camp at a border post on the frontier with Turkey, killing five people, a monitoring group said.

Turkey is sheltering more than 600,000 refugees from Syria’s almost three-year-long civil war and has kept its border open throughout the conflict.

Ambulances ferried the injured from the refugee camp to the southern Turkish city of Kilis, where a state hospital official said at least 40 people were being treated.

A Turkish border official said the blast near Turkey’s Oncupinar border post, which sits opposite the Syrian Bab al-Salameh gate, could be felt several kilometres away, but that the border gate remained open.

Amateur video posted on the Internet showed what appeared to be three bodies under blankets. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said five people were confirmed dead and a fire broke out in the camp after the blast.

Thousands of Syrians have been fleeing the city of Aleppo, some 60km south of Kilis, in recent weeks because of a campaign of improvised “barrel bomb” attacks by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Many of the displaced live at a makeshift camp on the Syrian side of the border. Yesterday’s blast hit this area, according to video footage.

Towns near Bab Al Salameh have also seen sporadic clashes between the rebels fighting Assad and fighters from an al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Abu Osama, a camp administrator, said the explosion happened behind his office and at least 20 tents were reduced to rubble. “Some of the bodies and tents melted from the explosion,” he said over the phone. “We have had thousands of new refugees come to this area the past 20 days because of the barrel bombing in Aleppo.”

He blamed the attack on militants from ISIL and said it had fired several rockets near the camp over the past few days where members of the rival Islamic Front rebel group are based.

An eyewitness in the refugee camp who spoke on condition of anonymity said he pulled four bodies from the tents.

“The bomb exploded on the main road in front of the camp and affected a 500 metre radius. This road is frequently used by civilians, busses and trucks,” he said.

2 killed in Syria-linked violence in Lebanon

Two people were killed in the Lebanese city of Tripoli yesterday including a military commander from the Alawite minority shot dead on his way to work, security sources said, the latest spasm of violence linked to the Syrian civil war.

In Beirut, a Palestinian man was named as one of two suicide bombers who blew themselves up near the Iranian cultural centre in the capital’s southern suburbs on Wednesday, killing at least four other people in other Syria-related violence.

The three-year-long civil war in neighbouring Syria has exacerbated tensions in Lebanon between groups sympathetic to the rival sides, posing a major security challenge to a new government that is seeking to stabilise the fragile state.

In Tripoli, the Syria war has fuelled tensions between Alawites loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and Sunni Muslim groups sympathetic to the uprising against him. Assad is also an Alawite, a religion derived from Shia Islam.

Yesterday morning, gunmen killed Abdel Rahman Youssef, a military leader in the pro-Syrian Arab Democratic Party from Tripoli’s Jabal Mohsen district, a day after three other people were wounded in clashes, security and party sources said.

The other man killed was Sunni, the sources said, the circumstances of his death were not immediately clear.

The city, Lebanon’s second largest, was tense after the shooting, with schools shutting their doors and many people keeping away from sites of potential clashes, a witness said.

The twin suicide bomb attack in Beirut on Wednesday was the seventh such bombing in the city’s predominantly Shia Muslim southern suburbs since last July.

A Sunni militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, describing it as a reprisal for the intervention of Hezbollah and Iran in Syria.

Investigators used DNA samples to identify one of the suicide bombers as Nidal al-Mugheyir, a Palestinian man who security sources said was in his early 20s and had been a follower of hardline Lebanese Sunni cleric Ahmad al-Asir.

Mugheyir was a resident of the mainly Shia village of Beisareya in southern Lebanon, where villagers torched his family home on Wednesday following reports he was behind the bomb attack.
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