The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports rebel fighters were massing inside Turkey to carry out an offensive on the Islamic State-held Syrian town of Jarablus.
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Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey would provide every kind of support needed to “cleanse” Turkey’s border with Syria of the extremists.
Syrian rebels are preparing to launch an attack to seize a town from Islamic State on the border with Turkey, a senior rebel said on Sunday, in a move that would frustrate Kurdish hopes to expand in the area.
Perhaps not coincidentally, a 12-year-old boy wearing a suicide vest was intercepted in Kirkuk, Iraq, over the weekend, less than 24 hours after the Kurdish wedding massacre in Turkey and only an hour after a suicide bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Kirkuk.
The foreign minister said Turkey and Erdogan played a key role in defeating the ideology of ISIS, adding: “Therefore, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is their number-one target”.
The majority of those killed in the wedding blast were children or teenagers, with 29 of the 44 victims identified so far aged under 18, media said. “ISIS has used child bombers before; there’s a monitoring group in the United Kingdom called the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and they say ISIS used 18 child bombers in 2015”.
Earlier Monday, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu reiterated that Turkey was determined to fight DAESH terrorists inside Turkey and in Syria, after a suicide bomber attacked a wedding party, killing at least 54 people, many of them children.
A suicide bomb attack on a Kurdish wedding in Turkey killed at least 54 people on Saturday evening, many of them children.
However Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says the identity of the bomber – initially thought to be a child – has not yet been established.
On 29 June, 41 people were killed in a gun and bomb attack by Isis militants at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, while 37 victims died in a suicide auto bombing by Kurdish separatists in Ankara in March.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but officials said it appeared to be the work of the Islamic State group.
One of the slain children is reported to be a Syrian, according to the report.
“We do not have a clue about who the perpetrators behind the attack were”, he added. On Monday, the Associated Press reported that the Turkish government was walking back that statement, and now says it’s not clear what age the attacker was.
Investigators are looking into the possibility that militants could have put explosives on a child without his or her knowledge and detonated them remotely, or even used a child with learning disabilities.
The bride and groom, who survived the bombing, urged authorities to act to prevent future bloodshed.
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Mr Erdogan said that in his view all “terror” groups are the same, be it the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party – supporters of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen whom he blames for the coup – or ISIS.
