Turkey launches new artillery strikes at IS in Syria

Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey would provide every kind of support needed to “cleanse” Turkey’s border with Syria of the extremists.

Turkey has also vowed to fight IS militants at home and to “cleanse” the group from its borders after a weekend suicide bombing at a Kurdish wedding in southern Turkey that killed at least 54 people, many of them children.

Turkey blamed ISIS for a horrific attack on a wedding which killed dozens in south Turkey last week.

Turkey says the IS group was responsible for the attack although Turkish officials have since backtracked on earlier claims that the suicide bomber was a child.

Their advances have made NATO-member Turkey wary and caused tensions between Ankara and Washington, which are likely to be addressed during talks with Turkish leaders, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Why weren’t those bad attacks sufficient for the Erdogan regime to finally declare war on ISIS and destroy its presence at the Turkish-Syrian border region?

Kurdish forces were in near full control of Syria’s city of Hasaka on Tuesday after battling pro-government militias, though some government officials remained holed up in buildings in the city center, a Kurdish official and monitoring group said.

The operation is important for Turkey’s security, Cavusoglu told a news conference in Ankara.

Turkey has launched separate artillery strikes on Kurdish and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) positions in northern Syria. The official said the aim was to open a corridor for the rebels.

“Two mortar bombs, on Tuesday, struck a residential area in Karkamis, a Turkish town about a mile across the border from the ISIS-held Syrian city of Jarablus”, the source said quoting a Turkish media outlet. As a member of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the US-led coalition, Turkey provides support for Syrian rebels fighting IS. Reuters TV footage showed around 10 Turkish tanks deployed at a village around 4 km (2.5 miles) from the border gate immediately across from Jarablus. Prime Minister Binali Yilidirm has said Turkey would take a more active role in Syria in the next six months to prevent the country from being divided along ethnic lines.

For Ankara, Islamic State is not the only threat across its frontier. Turkey is also concerned that attempts by Syrian Kurds to extend their control along the common border could add momentum to an insurgency by Kurds on its own territory. He said 69 people were wounded, with 17 of them in critical condition. The U.S. has embedded some 300 special forces operators with the SDF, according to the government. Gulen denies the charges.

Hurriyet said the type of bomb used – stuffed with 2-3 centimetre shards of iron and detonated with C-4 explosives – was similar to that used in previous suicide bombings against pro-Kurdish gatherings blamed on ISIL in the border town of Suruc and at Ankara train station past year. The report says the Turkish Armed Forces “covered the area with fire” without providing any details. Some in Turkey, particularly in the Kurdish southeast, feel the government has not done enough to protect its citizens from Islamic State.

A disproportionately large number of women and children were killed in the attack because it targeted henna night, a part of the celebration attended mainly by women and children, says BBC Monitoring’s Turkey analyst Pinar Sevinclidir. The groom was among those injured, but the bride was not hurt.