The attack ripped open Turkey’s fresh wounds from the suspected ISIS attack on Istanbul’s main airport in June that killed 44 people and the double suicide bombing at a peace rally in Ankara that killed 103 people in October.
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Kurdish fighters have become US allies in the battle against ISIS in Syria and Iraq and played a major role in driving the group out of Manbij this month.
The bombardment comes after a bomb attack blamed on the Islamic State in the Turkish town of Gaziantep on Sunday killed more than 50 people.
In a double-pronged approach, Turkish artillery shells on Tuesday hit positions held by the Kurdish YPG militants in the northern Syrian town of Manbij while continuing to target areas held by the IS group in Jarabus, according to local media reports.
In an earlier written statement, Erdogan said there is “no difference” between Islamic State, the militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, and followers of USA -based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he blames for a coup attempt last month.
Syrian activists, meanwhile, said that hundreds of Turkish-backed Syrian opposition fighters were gathered in the Turkish border area near Karkamis in preparation for an attack on Jarablus.
“Our border must be completely cleansed from Daesh”, he said in televised remarks, using an Arabic acronym for the IS group.
The Kurdish group makes up a significant portion of the US-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish and Arab alliance fighting ISIL in Syria.
Karkamis is in Gaziantep province, whose capital was struck by a devastating bomb attack on a wedding Saturday night and was blamed on ISIS.
The YPG targets were hit 20 times, while the cross-border attack on ISIL was still ongoing, a Turkish official told the Reuters news agency.
The wedding took place in a mainly Kurdish-inhabited neighborhood of Gaziantep about 60 miles north of the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo.
“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.
Mr. Cavusoglu accused Austria of “supporting a terrorist organisation which is attacking Turkey”, according to Austrian paper Der Standard.
The foreign minister stressed the importance of Turkey’s role, and that of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in refuting the extremist group’s ideology.
Shortly after Saturday’s bombing, the pro-Kurdish political party HDP condemned the attack, while noting it came just hours after a Kurdish militant organization battling the Ankara government for autonomy announced new plans to try to end the decades-long conflict.
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Sixty-six others were being treated in hospital, 14 in serious condition.
