TURKEY’S president has said the suicide bomber who blew themselves up at a wedding party, killing at least 51, was a child aged as young as 12 years old.
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Hurriyet Daily News reports that the death toll from the attack has now risen to 54 people, with 29 of those killed believed to have been under the age of 18.
Funerals have now taken place for more than 40 of those killed, while around 10 bodies have yet to be identified. He said 69 people were wounded, with 17 in critical condition.
“Initial results from the police department and governor’s office proves that this was an (Islamic State) attack”, Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan said.
Turkey said today the Syrian border region must be “completely cleansed” from the Islamic State group, after a weekend suicide bombing in Gaziantep blamed on the jihadists left at least 54 dead.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said the wedding party was for one of its members. A dual suicide bombing blamed on IS at a peace rally in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, in October killed 103 people.
The bride and groom were not in a life-threatening condition and were undergoing treatment, Anadolu reported.
Orhan Akin, Gaziantep bureau chief for the Ihlas News Agency, told CNN Turk that he saw “at least 20 ambulances carrying injured people”.
He said the earlier statement identifying the attacker as a child was a “guess” based on witness accounts.
“The aim of terror is to scare the people but we will not allow this”, said Şimşek, who also represents Gaziantep in the Turkish parliament.
IS has not claimed responsibility for Saturday’s bombing, but analysts say the group has a record of not doing so for bombings in Turkey.
Cavusoglu said Turkey had become a main target for IS because of the nation’s efforts to stop recruits from crossing into Syria to join the fighting, as well as hundreds of arrests of IS suspects in Turkey.
“ISIS has been trying to agitate or exploit already tense ethnic and sectarian faultlines to retaliate for the advancement of Syrian Kurds in the north of Syria and by Turkey’s attack on ISIS targets in Syria”, said Metin Gurcan, an independent security analyst and retired Turkish military officer who writes a column for Al-Monitor. There was one Syrian among the dead, Husam Cuma, aged 7.
Gülser Ateş, who was wounded in the attack, said she was had been speaking with her neighbor when the blast happened.
In May, Islamic State was blamed for a suicide vehicle bombing of the city’s security headquarters. He said that numerous victims were children.
In June, 44 people were killed by suspected ISIS suicide bombers at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport.
“To preserve perennially our unity and brotherhood, we must all face these terrorist organizations”. A US backed coalition of Syrian fighters and Kurds earlier this month drove IS fighters from that city after a two-month siege, pushing them into the countryside northward toward the Turkish border.
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In Syria, Turkish-backed rebels are preparing an attempt to seize the border town of Jarablus from Islamic State, a senior rebel official said, a move that would deny advancing Syrian Kurdish fighters control of the town.
