Turkish army howitzers stationed inside Turkey fired on ISIS targets in the town of Jarablus and PYD targets around the area of Manbij, the reports said. He said the earlier assertion that the attacker was child was a guess based on witness accounts.
Advertisement
Turkish media are saying that Turkey’s artillery has shelled Islamic State targets across the border in Syria.
Some expressed the sentiment that the current Turkish government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan would restore Ottoman influence in the region.
NPR reports that at least 22 of the bombing victims in Gaziantep were children. Manbij city was freed from the Islamic State group a few weeks ago by a joint local force of the Kurdish YPG group and Arab groups, known as Syria Democratic Forces and supported by the USA air force.
More than half of at least 54 persons killed in an attack on a Kurdish wedding party in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep were children, Turkish officials indicated on Monday.
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.
Speaking to reporters in Ankara, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said: “We are not in a position to verify anything about who the perpetrator was – if it was a child, an adult, or for which organisation”.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but officials said it appeared to be the work of the Islamic State group.
It added that the bombing, which it said had killed many children and women, resembled other suspected ISIS attacks on the party in Turkey, such as in Suruc in July 2015 and in Ankara in October.
Cavusoglu said Turkey had become a main target for the IS group because of measures it has implemented to stop recruits from crossing into Syria to join the fighting, as well as hundreds of arrests of IS suspects in Turkey.
“The initial findings of the governor and our police forces indicate the attack has been perpetrated by [the Islamic State group]”, Erdogan said Sunday.
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.
Advertisement
However Western states say Ankara has begun to move strongly against the group and seal its borders to jihadist traffic after the attacks blamed on ISIS on its soil this year. Sixty-six people are still in hospital.
