Türkiye vows to clear ISIS from border after wedding attack.
Turkey vowed on Monday to "completely cleanse" its border region of Islamic State militants after a suicide bombing, whose perpetrator is suspected of having links to the group, killed 54 people, including 22 children, during a Kurdish wedding.
By Orhan Coskun and Daren Butler
ANKARA/ISTANBUL (Reuters) Turkey vowed on Monday to "completely cleanse" its border region of Islamic State militants after a suicide bombing, whose perpetrator is suspected of having links to the group, killed 54 people, including 22 children, during a Kurdish wedding.
Saturday's attack in the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep was the deadliest recorded in Turkey this year. President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that the perpetrator of the suicide bombing was between 12 and 14 years old, adding that initial evidence pointed to the Islamic State.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, however, told reporters in Ankara on Monday that it was still too early to determine which organization was responsible or whether the attack had been carried out by a child.
A senior security official told Reuters that the device used was of the same type as that employed in the July 2015 suicide attack in the border town of Suruc and in the October 2015 suicide bombing at a rally of pro-Kurdish activists in Ankara.
The Islamic State has been blamed for both attacks. The group has been attacking Kurds in an apparent effort to further escalate ethnic tensions already heightened by the long-running Kurdish insurgency. Ankara's attack was the deadliest of its kind in Turkey, with over one hundred deaths.
"Daesh must be completely cleared from our borders, and we are ready to do whatever is necessary to achieve this," declared Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in an interview in Ankara, using an Arabic name for the group.