Authorities were trying to identify the child attacker, who President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said was aged between 12 and 14.
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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”.
Of the 54 victims, 29 were under the age of 18, the Haberturk newspaper reported.
A family member of a victim of a suicide bombing at a wedding celebration mourn over a coffin during a funeral ceremony in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, Turkey, August 21, 2016.
Meanwhile, three more people receiving treatment at hospitals after the attack in Gaziantep died from their wounds in the early hours of Monday.
However, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday that it was unclear whether the bomber was “a child or a grown-up”.
“A clue has not yet been found concerning the perpetrator”, Mr Yildirim told reporters, following a weekly cabinet meeting. The group was also accused of carrying suicide bombings at a rally of labor activists in the capital, Ankara, last October that left more than 100 people dead.
One mother, Emine Ayhan, lost four of her five children in the bombing while her husband is in intensive care, the Yeni Safak daily said.
“It appears to be an act to punish the PYD”, said Nihat Ali Ozcan a security and terrorism expert at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, referring to a Syrian Kurdish group whose militia is fighting IS.
The leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas said in a statement that “all of those killed were Kurds”.
Turkish news agency DHA broadcast footage showing the bride and groom overcome by emotion as they returned to the blast site at an apartment building that was home to the groom’s parents and where the newlyweds were to live after their wedding.
All through Saturday night, ambulances rushed the wounded to hospitals across Gaziantep, a major city with a large Kurdish population.
The group has deployed child suicide bombers to stage attacks in both Iraq and Syria.
Relations between the government and Turkey’s Kurdish minority have been strained as a result of a decades-long Kurdish insurgency.
Turkey shelled Islamic State positions in Syria on Tuesday for a second day, in response to mortar fire from across the border, Turkish media reported.
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 vehicle bombing by Kurdish separatists in Ankara in March.
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The Turkish military also pounded Kurdish YPG militants, whom it views as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – a Turkish-Kurdish rebel group fighting for autonomy within Turkey. The attack on Saturday in Gaziantep is proof that while Syria bleeds profusely, the spillover into Turkey is very real and seems to be largely uncontainable.
