Anger, grief after Turkey wedding bloodbath
Police are seeking to identify child bomber; Death toll rises to 54
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Monday that his country is determined to fight Islamic State group extremists both inside Turkey and in Syria, after a youth blew himself up at a Kurdish wedding party, killing at least 54 people, many of them children.
Cavusoglu said Turkey would provide every kind of support that maybe necessary to “cleanse” Turkey’s border with Syria of the extremists.
Police were on Monday scrambling to ascertain the identity of the child suicide bomber. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the bomber at the street wedding late on Saturday in the city of Gaziantep close to Syria was aged “between 12 and 14”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his condolences in a telegram to Turkey’s president, which he said shows the international communitymust work together in fighting terrorism.
Putin and Erdogan met two weeks ago for the first time since they decided to mend relations soured by Turkey’s downing of a Russian military aircraft along the Syrian border in November.
Putin’s said the attack was shocking in its “cruelty and cynicism and once again showed that terrorism doesn’ t recognize not only the laws of civilized society but also the very basic norms of human morality”.
Media said the majority of those dead were children or teenagers, with 29 of the 44 victims identified so far aged under 18. At least 22 victims were under 14, an official said.
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, said Hurriyet daily columnist Abdulkadir Selvi.
He said Turkish security forces believed that the attack had been timed as retaliation by jihadists for offensives both by Kurdish militias and pro-Ankara Syrian opposition forces against IS in Syria.
“There’s a fight against IS but we are paying the price,” Selvi said.
The leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party Selahattin Demirtas said in a statement that “all of those killed were Kurds”.
The bride and groom — a couple from the strongly Kurdish region of Siirt to the southeast — were rushed to hospital but not seriously wounded.
(The) cruelty and cynicism once again showed that terrorism doesn’t recognize not only the laws of civilized society but also the very basic norms of human morality.” Vladimir Putin, Russian president
Deadliest attack
The attack was the deadliest so far this year and first significant jihadist action in Turkey since the failed July 15 coup.
Hurriyet said the type of bomb used — stuffed with scraps of metal — was similar to the explosives used in previous suicide bombings against pro-Kurdish gatherings blamed on IS in the border town of Suruc and at Ankara train station last year.
All 44 victims identified so far were laid to rest in harrowing ceremonies in Gaziantep on Sunday with relatives throwing themselves on the coffins in desperation. The hillside graveyard was pockmarked before the ceremony with the holes of dozens of freshly dug graves for the victims.