Tell Tamer Truck Bombings, December 2015: What Happened

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Truck Bombs Kill Up to 60 in Tell Tamer, Syria, December 2015
FILE PHOTO. © SANA / Reuters

On Thursday 10 December 2015, three truck bombs exploded in Tell Tamer (also written Tal Tamr), a small town in Syria's north-eastern Al-Hasakah province. A spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia told Reuters that up to 60 people were killed and more than 80 wounded, most of them civilians. The so-called Islamic State claimed responsibility the next day. Early casualty figures varied widely, as they often do after attacks in war zones, and some first reports spoke of about 30 dead.

The attack hit a town that had already suffered more than most in 2015. Tell Tamer sits at the heart of the Khabur valley, home to one of Syria's oldest surviving Assyrian Christian communities, and it lay on a front line between Kurdish-led forces and IS. This article sets out what happened, why the town was a target, and how it fits into the wider story of the Syrian war.

What happened in Tell Tamer

According to Reuters reporting relayed by RT, the vehicles were packed with large quantities of explosives. One blast struck near a field hospital used by Kurdish forces; others hit the busy Souk al-Jumla market square, where most of the deaths occurred. The explosions badly damaged surrounding buildings, shops and roads.

Most of the dead and injured were civilians shopping or working in the market. Some Kurdish and Assyrian fighters from local self-defence units were also among the casualties. Images shared on social media that evening showed wrecked storefronts and smoke over the town centre.

Aftermath of the explosions in the village of Tal Tamer in #Hasakah which took the lives of 30 people & wounded 100+ pic.twitter.com/clbuYKGzwC

— IraqiSuryani (@IraqiSuryani1) December 10, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

In its online statement, IS said three of its members had each driven a vehicle and blown themselves up, describing their targets as "bases" of Kurdish fighters. The YPG, which controlled the town, had already blamed the group. The pattern, several suicide vehicles detonated close together in a crowded place, matched other IS attacks in north-east Syria that year.

Voices from the town

Shortly after the blasts, the Kurdish news agency ANHA (Hawar News) published a video of residents speaking among the ruins. A woman asked why the attackers had turned on the town itself, killing small children and destroying homes, when their war was supposedly with the YPG; she said nobody had the right to take people's houses or leave children without fathers. An elderly man insisted that the killing of innocent people had nothing to do with Islam and called the attackers barbarians whom no religion would accept.

Those reactions echo what many Syrian Muslims, Christians and Kurds said throughout the IS years: that the group's victims came from every community, and that its violence was rejected by the overwhelming majority of believers.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

Why Tell Tamer was a target

Tell Tamer is a crossroads town on the Khabur river, around 600 kilometres north-east of Damascus by road, linking Al-Hasakah city with the border regions to the west and north. In 2015 it was held by the Kurdish YPG and allied local units, while IS controlled territory just to the south and south-west. That made it both a military objective and an easy place to strike civilians.

The town also has deep symbolic importance for Assyrians. Thousands of Assyrians fled to the Khabur valley in the 1930s after the Simele massacre in northern Iraq, building some three dozen villages along the river. For eight decades the area remained a centre of Assyrian language, churches and culture in Syria.

Patlamalar sonucu yaşamını yitirenler ve yaralılar hakkında net bilgilere ulaşılamadı. pic.twitter.com/Veng2ZhZBA

— Radio DengêKurdistan (@denge_Kurdistan) December 10, 2015

(This post is no longer available on X.)

A year of attacks on the Khabur Assyrians

In late February 2015, IS fighters overran a string of Assyrian villages along the Khabur. They abducted more than 200 Assyrian Christians, including women, children and elderly people, and damaged or destroyed several churches. Most villagers fled to Al-Hasakah and Qamishli, and many never returned. The hostages were released in groups over the following year, reportedly after ransoms were paid through church intermediaries; IS published a video in September 2015 showing the killing of three of the captive men.

Kurdish-led forces, local Assyrian units and other fighters pushed IS back from the Khabur villages in the spring of 2015, but the area remained exposed. In the months before the December bombing, IS also carried out deadly attacks in Al-Hasakah city; one series of bombings in September, reported by Russia's TASS agency, killed several dozen people, many of them civilians, though the targets were Kurdish and government security sites.

For the Assyrians, Tell Tamer's bombing deepened a sense that their community in Syria might not survive. Before the war, Christians of all churches made up roughly a tenth of Syria's population; by the end of the decade their numbers had fallen sharply through emigration.

The wider Syrian war in 2015

At the time of the attack, the United Nations estimated that more than 250,000 people had been killed since 2011. Some 6.5 million Syrians were displaced inside the country and more than 4 million had fled abroad, mainly to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, with a growing number crossing to Greece and onward into Europe. In 2022 the UN human rights office estimated that more than 300,000 civilians had been killed in the first ten years of the conflict alone.

In north-east Syria, the YPG became the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces, formed in October 2015, which went on to drive IS from its last territory in 2019 with support from the US-led coalition. Tell Tamer later found itself near another front line when Turkey launched a military offensive into north-east Syria in October 2019, and Assyrian villages in the area again came under fire.

Remembering the victims

The names of most of those killed in the market that December are known only to their families and neighbours. Their deaths were part of a deliberate strategy: IS targeted marketplaces, mosques, churches and hospitals precisely because they were places where ordinary life continued. Remembering attacks like the one in Tell Tamer is a way of refusing that strategy, and of recognising the Assyrian, Kurdish and Arab families who stayed in the Khabur valley through it all.

Sources: Original report: RT, December 2015, citing Reuters, TASS and ANHA video; casualty figures as reported at the time and not independently confirmed; UN OCHA, Syria crisis overview. Photo: SANA / Reuters (file photo).

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