AT least nine people were killed Sunday when a car bomb exploded in a vegetable market in the northwest Syrian city of Afrin, in the latest such attack in towns under control of Turkey-backed rebel groups, witnesses and rebel sources said.

They said the blast came from a detonated car parked close to the busy market in the city only days after similar explosions hit crowded civilian areas in the towns of Azaz, Rae and al Bab near the border with Turkey under the control of Turkish-backed forces.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said last Wednesday his army would launch in the coming days an operation against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, whom his country views as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — a group classified by the West as a terrorist group and that has waged a three-decade insurgency in Turkey.

(SD-Agencies)