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Bombing at Wedding in Turkey Kills More Than 50 Bombing at Wedding in Turkey Kills More Than 50
(about 4 hours later)
ISTANBUL — The wedding had ended and the guests had started walking home when a suspected suicide bombing tore through the site of the ceremony in southeastern Turkey late Saturday, killing more than 50 people and wounding scores more, the latest in a string of attacks in the restive region in the past week. ISTANBUL — 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.
The deadly attack in Gaziantep was carried out by a suicide bomber between the ages of 12 and 14, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul on Sunday, citing police sources. He said 51 people had been killed in the attack and 69 people were receiving treatment in the hospital, with 17 people in critical condition. Just then a boy — no more than 14 years old, Turkey’s president said later — meandered into the gathering and detonated his vest of explosives.
Mr. Erdogan also issued a statement earlier saying that the Islamic State was probably behind the attack and that its aim was to sow divisions among ethnic groups in the country and to “spread incitement along ethnic and religious lines.” 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.
There was no claim of responsibility immediately after the attack. The devastating bombing of the Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep killed more than 50 people, for which the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Islamic State, the terror group that controls a swath of land straddling the frontier between Iraq and Syria.
More than 200 people had packed onto a narrow street in the district of Sahinbey, close to the Syrian border, for the Kurdish wedding when the explosion occurred around 11 p.m., witnesses said. “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.”
“We had just walked past the wedding and offered our good wishes when we heard the blast,” said Ibrahim Ates, who lives in the area. “Suddenly people started running past us. When we went back to see what had happened, everyone was on the floor, and there were body parts scattered everywhere and blood splattered on the walls.” 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. Bombings this year that Turkish officials have blamed the Islamic State for have struck Istanbul’s old city, near the Blue Mosque; its most famous shopping boulevard, Istiklal Avenue; and, in June, Istanbul’s main airport, among the busiest in Europe.
Mahmut Togrul, a lawmaker with the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party who visited the scene of the attack on Sunday, said the wedding had been a traditional Kurdish ceremony and had taken place in a predominantly Kurdish neighborhood. For years, critics have said that Turkey contributed to the chaos — allowing extremist rebels to cross its territory on their way to fight in Syria — to advance its goal of toppling the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. At the outset of the war in 2011, Mr. Erdogan was confident that Mr. Assad would quickly fall, as the dictators of Egypt and Tunisia had. But as the war ground on, Turkey increasingly found itself drawn in, with millions of refugees fleeing across the border and, over the last year, a spate of attacks within Turkey.
“Besna and Nurettin Akdogan, the bride and groom, survived the attack and are in stable condition,” Mr. Togrul said. “Many of the victims that died were children,” he added. At the same time, Kurdish militants in the southeast resumed a stalled war against the Turkish government, emboldened by the success of their brethren in Syria, where Kurds have carved out a region of autonomy in the country’s east.
The attack came nearly two months after militants suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State stormed Istanbul’s main airport with guns and bombs, killing at least 44 people. Now, Turkey finds itself with three enemies in the Syrian civil war — Mr. Assad, the Islamic State and Kurdish rebels — and escalating chaos within its own borders. The attack on Saturday in Gaziantep demonstrated how those conflicts sometimes overlap. The Islamic State, which has fought Kurds in Syria in cities like Kobani, have also targeted Kurds within Turkey, as they apparently did on Saturday by striking the wedding.
Turkey has been rocked by a wave of urban terrorist attacks in the past year as it confronts multiple threats, including the Islamic State, which recently lost ground in northern Syria, and Kurdish insurgents, who have resumed a war with the Turkish state in the southeast and were blamed by the authorities for four bombings in the past week. Turkey is also reeling from a failed military coup last month that aimed to topple the government of Mr. Erdogan and left at least 240 people dead. That conspiracy was blamed on followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric in self-exile in Pennsylvania. Mr. Erdogan said on Saturday that there was no difference between the various terrorist organizations — the Islamic State, Kurdish militants or followers of Mr. Gulen — that are attacking the country.
Turkey is also reeling from a failed coup last month that aimed to topple the government of Mr. Erdogan and that left at least 240 people dead. Mr. Erdogan said on Saturday that there was no difference among the various terrorist organizations attacking the country. Hours before the attack on Saturday, the Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, met with journalists over breakfast at an old Ottoman palace, once used by sultans for hunting excursions, that overlooks the Bosporus in Istanbul. He said Turkey would take a more active role in diplomatic efforts to end the war, working closely with world powers like Russia and Iran, two of Mr. Assad’s most strident backers.
Televised footage showed scenes of chaos in the aftermath of the blast at the wedding. Crowds gathered, shouting “God is the greatest” as forensic teams arrived at the site. Ambulances were seen rushing to the street and leaving with bodies covered in white sheets. On Sunday, police found parts of a suicide vest in the area where the blast took place, the Gaziantep chief prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Calling the Syrian conflict “the bleeding wound of the globe,” he said Turkey would accept a role for Mr. Assad during an interim period while the long-term future of the country was being resolved.
“Everyone here is devastated,” said Hilmi Karaca, a Kurdish activist who witnessed the explosion. “We can’t even carry out the funerals because the bodies are in pieces. They are struggling to identify the victims.” This was a slight shift in policy, as Turkey has long been adamant that Mr. Assad must go before any serious peace talks could take place. But it was unclear whether that matters now this far in to the conflict, and with Mr. Assad strengthened by Russian military support.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim condemned the attack and vowed to continue to fight terrorist groups. “No matter what this treacherous terror organization is called, we as the people, the state and the government will pursue our determined struggle against it,” he said. “In the long term, can Syria bear Assad?” Mr. Yildirim said. “No way.”
Earlier on Saturday, Mr. Yildirim told reporters that Turkey would take a more active role in addressing the conflict in Syria over the next six months and was willing to accept a role for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a transitional period. But he insisted that Mr. Assad would have no place in Syria’s future. In normal times, Gaziantep is famous for its cuisine, especially baklava, the sweet pastry made with pistachios grown nearby. Before war broke out, busloads of Syrians crossed the border almost daily to shop in Gaziantep, as Mr. Erdogan pushed stronger economic ties with Syria.
“In this area, we live in a ring of fire,” said Mr. Karaca, the activist. “We live in a place where mothers are weeping for their dead children just hours after crying tears of joy at a wedding.” Yet in recent years the city became a hub for lives upended — and preoccupied — by the civil war in Syria. Spies, foreign fighters, diplomats, journalists, relief workers and refugees passed through the city, sometimes all gathering at the same Starbucks. In the earlier days of the conflict it was a place of intrigue, transformed much as the Pakistani border city of Peshawar was during the 1980s when American-backed rebels moved through on their way to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
And then Gaziantep became more sinister and violent. The police found an Islamic State bomb-making facility in the city, which they said was used in an attack in Ankara last year that killed more than 100 people. The bomber who struck Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue came from there, officials said. The Islamic State also carried out murders of Syrian journalists in the city.
On Saturday, the city’s place as not just a remote transit hub for the war but a battleground itself came in to focus once again.
“We had just walked past the wedding and offered our good wishes when we heard the blast,” said Ibrahim Ates, a local man. “Suddenly people started running past us. When we went back to see what had happened, everyone was on the floor, and there were body parts scattered everywhere and blood splattered on the walls.”
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 than wounded, Mr. 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. Children have suffered immensely – one devastating image of a Syrian boy injured in an airstrike in Aleppo last week appeared on the front of newspapers around the world, a jarring reminder of the human cost of the war. The Islamic State, meanwhile, recruits boys as suicide bombers across Iraq and Syria.
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 blood bath,” according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency.
In Gaziantep on Sunday, a mass funeral was held at the Yesilkent cemetery. One of the mourners was Arif Yugmen, 35, who had left the wedding just before the attack.
When he heard of the bombing, he said, he went back and took some of the wounded victims to the hospital in his car.
Mr. Yugmen said the victims included so many children because they had gathered away from the folk dancing, in a place closer to the site of the blast.
Nearby, Mizgin Gurbuzun, grieved over her dead 16-year-old son, falling to her knees beside his coffin.
Rocking back and forth, and crying, she wailed, “My martyr son has gone.”