People mourn as they attend funeral services for dozens of people killed in last night’s bomb attack targeting an outdoor wedding party in Gaziantep, southeastern Turkey, Sunday, Aug. 21, 2016.
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Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, at an Ankara news conference, said that ISIS should be completely cleansed from the country’s borders and that the government is ready to do what it takes for that.
A devastating suicide attack on a wedding in Turkey was carried out by a child and appears to have been orchestrated by the Islamic State, Turkish officials say.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish President, blamed ISIS shortly after the bombing, the deadliest to hit Turkey this year.
Child bombers who are coerced often deliberately fail to launch their attacks, as the teen in Kirkuk may have done, she said. “It is natural for us to struggle against such an organization both inside and outside of Turkey”, he said.
In the Vatican, Pope Francis led hundreds of people in silent prayer for the victims of the attack, concluding by asking “for the gift of peace for everyone”.
The bombing is the deadliest terrorist attack in Turkey so far this year – and it had already been a brutal year.
The pro-Kurdish political party HDP also suggested that the attack could have been meant to exacerbate tensions between Kurds and the Turkish government, The Associated Press reports. “They all died”, said the groom, Nurettin Akdogan.
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.
Hakki Okur, 14, was among the young victims.
Hurriyet said the type of bomb used – stuffed with 2-3 centimetre shards of iron and detonated with C-4 explosives – was similar to that used in previous suicide bombings against pro-Kurdish gatherings blamed on IS in the border town of Suruc and at Ankara train station a year ago.
Erdogan said immediately after the Gaziantep attack, which he blamed on IS, that any strategy “meant to incite the citizens against each other along ethnic and religious lines will not work”.
At the same time, the government has repeatedly accused the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, which won landmark representation in Parliament in June 2015, of supporting armed separatists. A bomber – believed be a teenager – detonated his explosives as officials were handing out trophies to players after the tournament, killing 29 and wounding 60.
“This is one of the defining features of this conflict”, said Thierry Delvigne-Jean of the agency’s west and central Africa office.
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BBC News analyst Mark Lowen in Istanbul suggested that if IS is indeed behind the wedding attack, it could be seen as revenge for the terror group’s recent territorial losses in Syria.
