Turkey’s military bombed Islamic State and Kurdish targets across the border in Syria on Tuesday, state-run media said.
The bombardment comes after a bomb attack blamed on the Islamic State in the Turkish town of Gaziantep on Sunday killed more than 50 people. The state-run Anadolu Agency said Turkey fired the shells Tuesday after coming under mortar fire from the Islamic State-held town of Jarablus.
Syrian 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.
Why is Turkey strikes both IS and the Kurds?
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said that IS should be “completely cleansed” from areas in northern Syria near its border.
Turkish forces have been exchanging shellfire with IS positions in the Jarablus area since Monday.
However, Turkey is also wary of moves that might bolster Syrian Kurdish forces, known as the YPG, which it views as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Turkish-Kurdish rebel group fighting for autonomy since the 1980s. On Monday, Turkey shelled YPG positions near Manbij, a town they took from IS this month.
The 1,500 fighters poised to enter Syria from Gaziantep are believed to be Turkish-backed Syrian rebels. A senior rebel official quoted by Reuters said they were fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.
Turkey target
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.
Dogan news agency said the death toll in the Gaziantep bombing had risen on Monday to 54 after three more people died. Sixty-six were being treated in hospital, 14 in serious condition.
The attack comes with Turkey still shaken just a month after the government survived an attempted coup by rogue military officers, which Ankara blames on US-based Islamist preacher Fethullah Gulen. Gulen denies the charge.
Turkish authorities have said a destroyed suicide vest was found at the scene of the bombing.
A second security official told Reuters that they were investigating the possibility militants could have placed the explosives on the child without his or her knowledge and detonated them remotely, or that a child with a learning disability was duped into carrying the device, a tactic seen elsewhere in the region.
In the latest southeast violence, two Turkish security force members and five PKK militants were killed in clashes and attacks in three areas of eastern Turkey over the last 24 hours, officials said.
Some in Turkey, particularly in the Kurdish southeast, feel the government has not done enough to protect its citizens from Islamic State.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said the wedding party was for one of its members. The groom was among those injured, but the bride was not hurt.
Where is Assad in all this?
Syrian government forces are not directly involved in the battle for the border at Jarablus, having gradually lost ground in the north over more than five years of civil war.
Turkey’s long-time position has been that President Bashar al-Assad must be ousted as a condition for peace in Syria.
However, Prime Minister Yildirim acknowledged this week that he was one of the “actors” and suggested he could play a role in an interim leadership.
Sources-Reuters, BBC, AP