Student activists from towns across Turkey who had traveled to the border town of Suruc were waving banners and chanting their support for Syria’s Kurds when a blast struck Monday, killing at least 31 and wounding nearly 100 others.
The explosion was captured on video with footage of the grisly aftermath bringing home the horror of the attack, possibly by a teenage female suicide bomber, that left the screaming survivors dazed and nursing gruesome wounds.
The bombing Monday in the small Turkish town just across the border from Syria’s Kobani, the flashpoint Kurdish town that withstood a months-long siege by Islamic extremists, looks to be the handiwork of the Islamic State. Turkey’s Interior Ministry described the blast as a "terrorist attack" and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. A Turkish official said they suspected the bomber was an 18-year-old woman.
"We call on everyone to stand together and remain calm in the face of this terrorist attack which targets the unity of our country," the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
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The extremists have been pummeling nearby Kobani with suicide bombings the past few weeks in a bid to distract mainly Kurdish-led forces, who have made inroads recently into IS territory and have threatened to launch an attack on the militants’ Syrian capital of Raqqa.
As the blast detonated in Suruc there was a simultaneous bombing Monday in Kobani 10 kilometers away. A suicide bomber there targeted a Kurdish checkpoint killing two militiamen, according to the monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Monday’s Kobani blast is strengthening suspicions that IS was behind the bombing in Suruc, Turkish officials say.
The explosion in Suruc ripped through the garden of a cultural center where Turkish and Kurdish activists from the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations had just eaten before heading to Kobani to build a library and playground in the ruined town, part of a publicity exercise to pressure Turkey and Western powers to do more to rebuild devastated Kobani. A video posted on Facebook by one of the youth activists after the blast showed 20 people lying on the ground, some still alive.
Eyewitnesses say the force of the blast rocked the small center of Suruc, shattering windows, setting off a fire and panicking Kurdish refugees gathered in the main square in the shadow of a stone pomegranate, a fruit Suruc is famous for growing. More than 30,000 refugees from Kobani and surrounding villages still live in a tent camps in Suruc.
The fear now among Turkey’s leaders is the Islamic extremists won’t stop with Suruc and the bombing could herald more attacks along the Turkish side of the border as a warning to Ankara not to intervene militarily in Syria, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to do recently.
"If it is Daesh [IS], it will not stay in Suruç,” Muhsin K?z?lkaya, a lawmaker from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) told reporters. “Very soon we could end up like Syria," he added.
Last month Turkish leaders reinforced the border, deploying additional troops and armor as concerns mounted about the risk of spillover as fighting between Kurdish forces, rebel groups, Syrian government troops and Islamic State militants intensified.
Ankara warned it would retaliate if Turkey’s security is threatened by either Islamic extremists or Syrian Kurds along border. Ankara fears the Kurds will try to establish their own state in northeast Syria, and for many in President Erdogan’s party the Kurds represent a bigger long-term threat than the Islamic State.
Turkish press reports suggested Erdogan was eager to launch a broader go-it-alone intervention to establish a buffer zone inside Syria, but without U.S. support and reluctance from Turkey’s military, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu tamped down war fever.
“If we ever reach a conclusion that Turkey's borders are under any threat, our country is ready for any contingency and it has done everything necessary for that readiness,” Davutoglu said last month in Istanbul.
But the drums of war were beating a little louder again Monday in the wake of the Suruc bombing.
Deputy Prime Minister Yalç?n Akdo?an, the first senior government official to make a public statement concerning the attack, tweeted, “These terrorist attacks aimed at Turkey, our nation’s unity and integrity and serenity and peace will not achieve their goal in any way.” He vowed, “the state, the government and the nation” will foil the attacks.