In a double-pronged approach, Turkish artillery shells on Tuesday hit positions held by the Kurdish YPG militants in the northern Syrian town of Manbij while continuing to target areas held by the IS group in Jarabus, according to local media reports.
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Most of the victims were children, media reports say. Almost 70 others were wounded in the attack, the deadliest in Turkey this year.
On Sunday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the suicide bomber was a child between 12 and 14 years old.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim condemned the bombing, which he said turned “a wedding party into a place of mourning” and he vowed to prevail over the “devilish” attacks.
Turkish officials are backtracking on an earlier statement that the suicide bomber who attacked a wedding ceremony was a child.
He said rebels had recently successfully removed ISIS from al-Rai, another Syrian town on the Turkish border being used as a transit point by the terror group, and said Turkey would continue to give support to drive ISIS from the border.
But Turkish officials believe the Islamic State was responsible for this weekend’s bombing.
Kurds accuse Turkey of using the US-led coalition against IS as a cover to attack the PKK in both Turkey and Iraq, and now against the YPG in northern Syria.
On Tuesday, two mortar bombs struck a residential area in Karkamis, a Turkish town about a mile across the border from the ISIS-held Syrian city of Jarablus, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
“We will provide all kinds of support to the Jarabulus operation”, Cavusoglu said, promising to help “cleanse” IS from neighbouring countries.
“(IS) martyred our … citizens.
Hurriyet said the authorities still suspected IS was behind the attack as the main line of inquiry, with investigators taking DNA samples in Gaziantep from the families of possible IS suspects.
The statement also said the Gaziantep attack “targets those determined and consistent in peace … and those struggling for democracy, equality and freedom”.
The Turkish military also pounded Kurdish YPG militants, whom it views as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – a Turkish-Kurdish rebel group fighting for autonomy within Turkey.
US-backed Kurdish forces have been eager to drive ISIS out and to remove the group’s access to resupply of materiel and fighters from Turkey. He said it’s unclear at the present time whether the attacker was “a child or an adult”.
The military fired 40 shells at four Islamic State targets in Syria, said Turkish broadcaster NTV.
On Monday the death toll from Saturday’s bombing rose to 54, after three more people succumbed to their injuries. Fighting erupted during one of the funerals after some officials arrived with Turkish flags, angering the mostly Kurdish mourners who responded by hurling stones at them.
Another survivor, wedding guest Nursel Saglam, was on a rooftop overlooking the outdoor celebrations when the explosion ravaged the just joyous scene.
“I can’t forget that moment”, Saglam said.
“I can not recount what I saw”, said Ilter, who lost five young cousins. Worrisome as many security experts say is that it may seriously affect the social fabric of the nation and the power hungry Erdogan will get one more opportunity to press his offensive state agencies against his suspected enemies. “There is nothing to say, it was murder”.
“My uncle’s children died”.
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Saturday’s bombing claimed over 50 lives, of which at least 22 were aged below 14.
