Boko Haram: In a report this year, Unicef said one in five suicide attacks claimed by Boko Haram across Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad are now carried out by children.
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All 44 victims identified so far were laid to rest in harrowing ceremonies in Gaziantep on Sunday, with relatives throwing themselves on the coffins in grief, an AFP correspondent said. Reuters TV footage showed around 10 Turkish tanks deployed at a village around 4 km (2.5 miles) from the border gate immediately across from Jarablus.
After all, after carefully crafting Turkish public opinion to reject peace and compromise with Kurds in Turkey and to treat Kurds in Syria as a bigger terror threat than the Islamic State, Turkish officials will simply shrug their shoulders and say they must follow the will of the people.
A senior rebel official said Turkish-backed Syrian rebels were preparing to launch an attack to seize Jarablus from Islamic State, a move that would deny control to advancing Syrian Kurdish fighters.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Ankara could not confirm who was the perpetrator of the attack on a Kurdish wedding in the city of Gaziantep which left 54 dead, apparently contradicting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who had said it was a child bomber acting on IS orders.
The attack came after the Syria Democratic Forces, a coalition led by the main Kurdish militia groups in Syria, captured the former IS stronghold of Manbij in northern Syria under the cover of airstrikes by the US -led coalition. He said the earlier assertion that the attacker was child was a “guess” based on witness accounts.
“Our border must be completely cleansed from Daesh”, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in televised remarks, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
Turkey views the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Turkish-Kurdish rebel group fighting for autonomy since the 1980s.
Ozcan, the security expert, said Saturday’s attack was likely carried out by a local IS cell whose members would have known the wedding was a Kurdish one and targeted the wedding party for the “shock” value.
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The authorities were also looking for two individuals said to have accompanied the suspected suicide bomber into the wedding party but who then left the scene. “I am not myself since”.
