Turkey stumped on wedding attacker

The bombing late Saturday in Gaziantep was the deadliest attack in Turkey this year. President Tayyip Erdogan confirmed on Sunday that the suicide bomber was aged between 12 and 14.

The Gaziantep governor’s office said Tuesday authorities were working to identify eight remaining bodies, adding: “It is assessed that the person who carried out the (attack) is among them”. The statement Sunday added that Vice President Joe Biden will visit Ankara Wednesday to reaffirm the USA commitment to work together with Turkey against the “scourge of terrorism”.

Sixty-six others were being treated in hospital, 14 in serious condition.

Jarablus, which lies on the western bank of the Euphrates River where it crosses from Turkey into Syria, is one of the last important IS-held towns standing between Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Syria.

Earlier Monday, FM Çavuşoğlu reiterated that Turkey was determined to fight Daesh terrorists inside Turkey and in Syria, after a suicide bomber attacked a wedding party, killing at least 54 people, many of them children.

Prosecutors said a search was also under way for two people believed to have accompanied the suspected attacker to the wedding party but who left before the blast.

The Gaziantep attack came amid continuing turmoil in Turkey in the month after Erdogan’s government survived an attempted coup by rogue military officers, which the Turkish leader has blamed on USA -based cleric Fethullah Gulen. It is possible that the bomber had come over the border from Syria but ISIS is also known to have built homegrown cells inside Turkey in Gaziantep and even Istanbul, wrote its well-connected columnist Abdulkadir Selvi.

The Turkish government accuses the HDP of links to Kurdish militants fighting ISIS across the border in Syria.

The rebels, groups fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, are expected to attack Jarablus from inside Turkey in the next few days.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said: “Daesh should be completely cleansed from our borders and we are ready to do what it takes for that”. “It is natural for us to struggle against such an organisation both inside and outside of Turkey”.

Turkey’s artillery has shelled so-called “Islamic State” group targets across the border in Syria for the second consecutive day, according to a senior Turkish official.

Gurcan said in an email to The Associated Press that IS has been trying to agitate or exploit ethnic and religious tensions in Turkey, and “we know very well to what extent wedding attacks can sow disorder in nation’s social fabric from the Afghanistan experience”.

Turkey is becoming ever more embroiled in the Syrian civil war and officials have warned it could be the target of more deadly bombings.