Turkey said on Monday Islamic State (IS) jihadists must be totally pushed out of the Syrian border region, after a weekend suicide bombing in the city of Gaziantep blamed on the group left at least 54 dead.
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The death toll from a suicide bomb attack at a wedding in the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep on Saturday night has risen to 54, including at least 29 children, local media reported on Monday.
But other funerals would have to wait because numerous victims were blown to pieces and DNA forensics tests would be needed to identify them, security sources said. Sixty-six were being treated in hospital, 14 in serious condition.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the bomber was aged “between 12 and 14” and that initial findings showed it had been “perpetrated by Daesh (IS)”.
The pro-Kurdish political party HDP condemned the attack on the wedding, which it said was attended by many of its party members.
He said the earlier statement identifying the attacker as a child was a “guess” based on witness accounts.
In Gaziantep, the chief prosecutor’s office said they had found a destroyed suicide vest at the blast site.
“To preserve perennially our unity and brotherhood, we must all face these terrorist organizations”.
Shortly before the Gaziantep bombing on Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım made clear that his government is considering taking the unprecedented step of allowing Moscow to use Incirlik air base to bomb ISIS. “Nothing but body parts”, the groom’s brother, Sukru Akdogan, told the state-run Anadolu news agency.
She says “once again innocent men, women and children are the victims of cowardly and perfidious violence; I condemn this attack in the strongest terms”. The deadliest was last October, when suicide bombers killed more than 100 people at a rally of pro-Kurdish and labor activists in Ankara.
Turkey-based journalist Andrew Finkel said the blast targeted a Kurdish wedding party, and may have been an attempt to inflame ethnic tensions in the city, now home to many refugees from the Syrian conflict across the border. He said ambulances were dispatched to the scene, and dead and wounded people were taken to hospitals. “If my remaining child was not alive, I would commit suicide”, she said. Before war broke out in Syria, busloads of Syrians crossed the border nearly daily to shop there.
Islamic State is also fighting US -backed Syrian Kurdish rebels, who have taken ground from the hardline group.
In the immediate aftermath of the Gaziantep bombing, Erdogan said there was “absolutely no difference” between the Islamic State, Kurdish rebels and Gulen’s movement, calling them terrorist groups.
The attack followed a string of strikes blamed on ISIS and Kurdish militants in recent months but was the deadliest so far this year and first significant jihadist action in Turkey since a failed July 15 coup. Turkey’s southeast has been hit by a wave of violence since the collapse of a ceasefire with the PKK in July past year.
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This reorientation accelerated last month after Moscow warned Erdoğan of the coup being prepared against him by Turkish officers acting out of the Incirlik air base in Turkey, a critical staging ground for United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation air strikes on Syria and Iraq.
