In the past year, Turkey has suffered a series of extremist attacks by Kurdish militants and radical Islamists, the deadliest being a double bombing on a peace rally in Ankara and a triple suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport. Sixty-six people are still in the hospital, 14 of them in a serious condition, Dogan news agency reported.
Advertisement
In the latest southeast violence, two Turkish security force members and five PKK militants were killed in clashes and attacks in three areas of eastern Turkey over the last 24 hours, officials said.
It is possible that the bomber had come over the border from Syria but IS is also known to have built homegrown cells inside Turkey in Gaziantep and even Istanbul, wrote its well-connected columnist Abdulkadir Selvi.
He said Turkish security forces believed that attack had been timed as retaliation by jihadists for offensives both by Kurdish militias and pro-Ankara Syrian opposition forces against IS in Syria.
“There’s a fight against IS but we are paying the price”, he wrote, using another acronym for the group.
Distraught to revisit the scene of so much bloodshed, the couple were rushed back to the hospital for treatment, with the overwhelmed bride carried into the ward by her husband and a relative.
The attack also comes after last month’s military coup attempt that the government blamed on USA -based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen and his supporters.
Writing in The Independent following that attack, Yasmin Ahmed said: “There seems to be limits to our solidarity and these boundaries look uncomfortably like the map of western Europe”.
The BBC said Turkish officials were on Monday awaiting the DNA test results as they tried to identify the suicide attacker.
In an earlier written statement, Erdogan said there is “no difference” between ISIS, the militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, and Gulen’s followers. Hurriyet newspaper and other reports said the mortar rounds were fired from IS-held Jarablus, Syria.
Officials said more than half the victims in the attack on Gaziantep were under the age of 18.
However, a security official said they were investigating the possibility militants could have placed the explosives on the child without their knowledge and detonated them remotely.
The hillside graveyard was pock-marked before the ceremony with the holes of dozens of freshly dug graves for the victims.
Advertisement
Around 300 people have died in the violence but few incidents have garnered a response on the scale seen after Isis’ attacks in Paris and Brussels. There was one Syrian among the dead, Husam Cuma, aged 7.
