Twenty-two of the 54 killed in a devastating bomb attack that struck a Kurdish wedding celebration in southern Turkey were under 14, a Turkish official said Monday.
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Speaking to reporters in Istanbul Sunday, Erdogan said a suicide bomber aged between 12 and 14 was involved in the attack, adding the bomber either blew himself up or was remotely detonated.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said: “Daesh should be completely cleansed from our borders and we are ready to do what it takes for that”.
“Both the Ankara and Suruc attacks were blamed on Islamic State, reinforcing the suspicion that the militant group was also behind the Gaziantep bombing on Saturday evening, the official said”.
“(IS) martyred our. citizens.
“We stand beside the people of Turkey at this sad time”.
Cavusoglu said Turkey was a “prime target of Daesh” because the government had dried up the group’s resources of foreign terrorist fighters, placing an entry ban on 55,000 members and deporting around 4,000 suspects.
Turkey has been facing multiple attacks in the past year that have been credited to Kurdish militants with ties to the now-outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or ISIS.
Hurriyet said the type of bomb used – stuffed with scraps of metal – was similar to explosives used in previous suicide bombings against pro-Kurdish gatherings blamed on ISIL in the border town of Suruc and at Ankara train station a year ago.
Selahattin Demirtas, a leader in the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), released a statement saying that “all of those killed [at the wedding] were Kurds”.
Quoting security sources, some Turkish media reported earlier the Gaziantep attack could have been retaliation by IS for an operation carried out by Ankara-backed opposition rebels against the jihadists in Jarablus in northern Syria.
“It appears to be an act to punish the PYD”, Ozcan said, referring to a Syrian Kurdish group whose militia is fighting IS.
Ozcan said the group chose a wedding party and sent a child to carry out the attack to increase the “shock” effect.
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More funerals were scheduled in Gaziantep for at least three of the victims on Monday. “There is nothing to say, it was murder”. “One was only 5”, he said.
