At least 32 people were killed Tuesday in an ISIS attack near a refugee camp on the Syrian side of the border with Iraq, activists said.
The attack came as the Kurdish-Arab alliance known as the Syrian Democratic Forces presses an offensive against ISIS in the town of Tabqa as part of an assault on the extremist bastion Raqqa.
The dawn ISIS attack hit a makeshift camp where some 300 families were waiting to cross into SDF-held territory in Hasakeh province, in northeastern Syria.
“At least five suicide attackers blew themselves up outside and inside a camp for Iraqi refugees and displaced Syrians in Hasakeh province,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights activist group.
Heavy clashes then erupted between the ISIS fighters and the SDF, some of whose combatants were among the dead, Abdel Rahman told AFP.