Child suicide bomber hits wedding in Turkey
At least 51 people were killed and nearly 70 others wounded by the boy at a Kurdish wedding party near Turkey’s border with Syria.
The wedding on Saturday night was winding down, and some guests had already left. But the music was still playing and people were still dancing in the narrow streets of Gaziantep, a city not far from the Syrian border.
Just then a child — no more than 14 years old, Turkey’s president said later — meandered into the gathering and detonated a vest of explosives.
Suddenly, the most joyous of occasions became a scene of blood and gore, with body parts scattered all around. Once again, the horrors of Syria’s civil war had visited Turkey. The devastating bombing of the Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep killed more than 50 people, for which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Islamic State, the terrorist group that controls a swath of land straddling the frontier between Iraq and Syria.
“In this area, we live in a ring of fire,” said Hilmi Karaca, a Kurdish activist who witnessed the explosion.
“We live in a place where mothers are weeping for their dead children just hours after crying tears of joy at a wedding.”
The attack was the deadliest in a string of terrorist bombings that have struck Turkey this year, as it grapples with the spiraling chaos of spillover from the war in Syria.
Mahmut Togrul, a lawmaker with the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party who on Sunday visited the scene of the attack, said the wedding had been a traditional Kurdish ceremony and had taken place in a predominantly Kurdish neighborhood. He said that many of the victims — at least 51 people were killed and 69 more wounded, Erdogan said on Sunday — were children.
That the perpetrator of the attack and so many of its victims were so young was a potent illustration of the degradation of the Syrian war as it has inflamed the region.
The bride and groom on Saturday, Besna and Nurettin, survived without serious injuries. Neighbors said they were cousins who had been engaged for six months. After being released from the hospital, the bride said, “They turned our wedding into a bloodbath,” according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency.