Saturday’s bombing claimed over 50 lives, of which at least 22 were aged below 14.
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But Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said early information was wrong and they “do not have a clue” who carried out the attack.
On Monday, Turkish artillery attacked a US -backed Syrian Kurdish militia as well as IS positions in Syria.
A USA backed coalition of Syrian fighters and Kurds earlier this month drove Islamic State fighters from that city after a two-month siege, pushing them into the countryside northward toward the Turkish border.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the attack on the Islamic State which, he said, “is trying to position and organize itself in Gaziantep”.
It says the group must now be cleared from the border region, and has been bombarding targets across the border in northern Syria ahead of an expected ground attack.
CNN-Turk and NTV channels later reported that Turkish armed forces launched artillery strikes on separate targets of IS jihadists and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) Kurdish militia in northern Syria. The U.S. says it has embedded some 300 special forces with the SDF. French and British special forces operators as well have been spotted advising the SDF.
Following the latest attacks and the comments by the foreign minister, #TurkeyHitsISIS trended worldwide on Twitter as Turkish nationalists expressed support for the attacks on both the Islamic State group and the Kurdish militia.
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, “We want to end these massacres”. Historically, the vast, vast majority of ISIS fighters have entered Syria by way of Turkey, but Turkish officials have claimed to slow that flow. With Turkey becoming a police state with a press less free than not only Russian Federation but perhaps also Iran, it is time to ratchet up Voice of America and other broadcasting both in Turkish and in Kurdish to fill an information gap that Erdoğan seeks to maintain.
The Jarablus Military Council later blamed the killing of al-Jader on Turkish security agents.
The Hurriyet newspaper and others said the mortar rounds hit the town of Karkamis, in Turkey’s Gaziantep province. “Let no one else get hurt”.
The wedding party would have been a tempting target: The bride and groom both came from well-known Kurdish families affiliated with a pro-Kurdish political party, the People’s Democratic Party, and Gaziantep is a known haven for Islamic State sleeper cells.
A Turkish army tank and an armored vehicle are stationed near the border with Syria, in Karkamis, Turkey, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2016.
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Remember that Turkey has the second largest army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the United States has been conducting air strikes against the targets in Syria from the Incirlik airbase and around fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs have also been deployed there, whose safety became a matter of real concern during the attempted coup when the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup; movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker. For five years fighting has raged in Syria – a globally resonant nightmare kept going in part by the insistence of Bashar Assad¿s opponents that he must go even though they were failing to dislodge him from power.
