Two car bombs have hit a Turkish town near the border with Syria, killing 18 people and injuring 22 others, local media have reported.
Turkish channel NTV said Saturday’s explosions targeted Reyhanli in the southern Turkish province of Hatay just a few kilometres from the main border crossing into Syria.
Muammer Guler, Turkey’s Interior Minister, said a series of blasts had been caused by car bombs.
Two vehicles packed with explosives blew up near the town hall and the post office in Reyhanli, Anatolia news agency quoted the minister as saying. The news came as Syrian troops fought rebels in a bid to take back a key supply route linking the centre of the country to Aleppo in the north, a monitoring group said.
“Fierce battles raged pitting troops against rebels. Regime troops fought to reopen the road linking Hama to Aleppo,” Rami Abdul Rahman, the director for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the AFP news agency.
Key supply route
Rebels cut off the road, referred to as the Desert Road, on Thursday. The army had been using it as its main supply route to Aleppo province, large swathes of which are under insurgent control. Last March, the army’s command had announced “the return of safety and security” to villages located on the road.
Saturday’s violence comes a day after at least 95 people were killed across Syria, said the Observatory. Among them were 32 civilians, 45 rebels and 18 troops.
Meanwhile, Russia said on Saturday there was disagreement over who should represent the opposition in a Syrian peace process. The revelation came only days after Moscow and Washington announced a joint effort to bring government and rebels to an international conference.
The dispute bodes ill for a civil war in which more than 70,000 people, mostly civilians, have died, and that has left foreign powers looking increasingly helpless.
A senior Kremlin official who attended talks on Friday between President Vladimir Putin and David Cameron, the British prime minister, said it would be impossible to meet a target of holding the conference by the end of May. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, tried to free a two-year diplomatic logjam on Tuesday by saying they would seek to organise a conference, ideally this month.
The Russian official said there was broad agreement that the situation in Syria was dire. “Beyond that there are very many differences: who can take part in this format, who is legitimate and who is not legitimate,” the state-run Itar-Tass agency quoted him as saying, on condition of anonymity.