Bomb blast in a bus kills 3 civilians in Syria's Afrin: monitor

A bomb blast in a bus killed three civilians Sunday in the northern Syrian city of Afrin on the first anniversary of a Turkish attack on the Kurdish-majority region, a war monitor said. Nine other people, including fighters, were wounded in the explosion, the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP. Turkish troops and allied rebel groups seized the Afrin region from Kurdish forces in March last year after a two-month air and ground offensive. "The explosion is the result of a bomb that was placed in a bus in the centre of Afrin," Abdel Rahman said. It was not immediately clear who was behind the blast, the second to rock Afrin since December 16 when a car bomb killed at least nine people, including five civilians, near a pro-Turkey rebel post in the city. That explosion came after Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan threatened to launch a new offensive against the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) in Syria. Turkey accuses the YPG of being "terrorists", but the Kurdish militia also forms the backbone of a US-backed alliance fighting the Islamic State group in Syria.