Saturday’a attack was the deadliest in a series of bombings in Turkey this year, and President Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday that Islamic State (IS) was likely behind it.
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“The bride and groom’s happiest day was poisoned”.
Hundreds of civilians were attending a Kurdish street wedding party when the bombing took place.
There was no claim of responsibility immediately after the attack.
The attack also comes after last month’s failed military coup that the government blamed on US -based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen and his supporters.
“The massacres’ (perpetrators) without any doubt are those who attacked Suruc, Ankara, those who have been bombing Kurdish towns for more than a year”. He said 69 people were in hospital and 17 were “heavily injured”.
Malaysia today condemned the bomb attack in the Turkish city of Gaziantep on Saturday, which killed 51 people and injured 94 others. Perhaps this attack on a Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep was an act of revenge.
“We stand by our ally Turkey and pledge to continue to work closely together to defeat the common threat of terrorism”, said U.S. Ambassador to Turkey John Bass. Sahin Bey district is said to have a large number of Kurdish residents and reports indicate the wedding too had a strong Kurdish presence, fuelling speculation of ISIL involvement.
Security expert Metin Gurcan, a former Turkish military officer and columnist for the online newspaper Al-Monitor, said that IS view the attack as “hitting two birds with one stone” – as retaliation for Syrian Kurdish advances on their forces in Syria, and for Turkey’s attacks on IS targets.
The pope urged the faithful to pray for the victims while United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon called for the perpetrators to be “quickly identified and brought to justice”. Three suspected Islamic State suicide bombers killed 44 people at Istanbul’s main airport in June. Gulen has denied the charge. A dual suicide bombing blamed on IS at a peace rally in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, in October killed 103 victims.
However, other security officials say it could also have been carried out by Kurdish militants.
Kurdish militia have played a central role in recent battlefield victories against ISIS in northern Syria, including driving the group from the key city of Manbij earlier this month and cutting a key supply route from the Turkish border to its heartland in Raqqa.
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Turkey began air strikes against IS last August, in the weeks after a peace process with the PKK collapsed, and it also began targeting PKK targets in northern Iraq.
