ISTANBUL -- Turkey's president vowed on Sunday to "destroy terrorists" after months of deadly attacks throughout the country and reiterated his claim that a child suicide bomber was responsible for an Aug. 19 explosion that claimed at least 54 lives in the southeast.
Speaking at a rally in Gaziantep, where the suicide bombing took place at a Kurdish wedding, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the "terrorists" are being "picked up one by one" by Turkey's security forces.
"They will all be cleansed out like a cancer cell," he told a roaring crowd of his supporters. "We will find them and punish them."
Last week, Erdogan said a 12- to 14-year-old child was the suicide bomber, but Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said later that the bomber was still unidentified and investigations continued. On Sunday, Erdogan reiterated the claim without saying whether it's a result of the investigation.
"Terror has used a 14-year-old child as a suicide bomber and shed blood, killed people," he said. "In this attack, our 54 citizens, including 34 children, died."
Authorities have blamed the Islamic State group for the Gaziantep attack, but neither the Islamic State nor any other militant groups have claimed responsibility.
Erdogan repeated that the country's parliament will decide whether to reintroduce a death penalty after a failed coup on July 15 that claimed at least 270 lives. That has triggered an outcry by rights groups in Turkey and the West.
"My nation wants the death penalty," he said. "That is the decision of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey."
Turkey has sent tanks across the Syrian border after weeks of deadly attacks by the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the Islamic State. The move aims to both fight the Islamic State and halt the advance of Syrian Kurdish groups.
Speaking at the rally, Erdogan said his military is committed to fighting terrorism in Syria and Iraq.
Turkey, he said, also is determined to "uproot" the Syrian Kurdish group, calling it a terrorist organization. But he didn't specify a goal for the fight against the Kurdish forces.
Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting the militants of the Islamic State group, but the airstrikes that began Saturday marked the first time it has targeted Kurdish-led forces in Syria.
"We will support all work to clean Syria and Iraq of Daesh," Erdogan told the rally, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. "That's why we are in Jarablus, that's why we are in Bashiqa [in Iraq]. If necessary, we will not shy away from taking responsibility in the same way in other areas."
Turkey has troops stationed in Bashiqa in northern Iraq, and it was not clear if his reference to Jarablus means he intends to base his troops there.
Erdogan then turned his focus to the main Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party.
"We are as determined about the [party], the separatist terror organization's Syrian wing," he said. Ankara views the group and the militia affiliated with it, which forms the backbone of the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces, as an extension of the Kurdish insurgency that is raging in southeastern Turkey.
"We will continue until we uproot this terror organization," Erdogan told the rally.
On Sunday, two separate blasts in the Turkey's Kurdish-dominated southeast killed one Turkish soldier and wounded eight others, and Kurdish militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade at a civilian airport, officials and the state-run news agency said.
One soldier was killed and three were wounded after a roadside bomb was triggered remotely by rebels linked to the Kurdistan Workers' Party in the Hakkari province, the state-run Anadolu Agency said. In the ensuing firefight that included army helicopters, 10 militants were killed, the private Dogan news agency said. The report couldn't be independently verified.
In another attack, five civilian village guards were wounded in Siirt province after their van hit an improvised explosive device on a road, Anadolu said, blaming the Kurdistan Workers' Party for the blast.
Earlier, Kurdish rebels, apparently targeting a police checkpoint at Diyarbakir Airport, fired a grenade that exploded near the airport's VIP passenger entrance, shattering windows, the local governor's office said. No injuries were reported. Passengers were taken to safety after the attack, and flights resumed after a brief pause during the police investigation.
Violence between the Kurdistan Workers' Party and security forces resumed last year, after the collapse of a two-year peace process in July. Since then, more than 600 Turkish security personnel and thousands of Kurdish militants have been killed, according to Anadolu. Rights groups say hundreds of civilians have also been killed in the clashes.
Also on Sunday, Russia lifted its ban on charter flights to Turkey, opening the way to a resumption of the package tours that were a major source of revenue for Turkey.
In rescinding the ban, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said he was doing so on the orders of President Vladimir Putin.
Russia imposed the ban in November after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane at the Syrian border. After Erdogan apologized for the downing, Putin said that charter flights to Turkey could resume "in the near future."
Rebels, Kurds Clash
In Syria, rebels backed by Turkey made major gains Sunday in the north, expelling Kurdish-led forces from towns and villages as part of a determined campaign by Ankara to push the militants east of the Euphrates River.
Pro-Turkey Syrian rebels of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army said they had wrested 10 villages from Kurdish control, while seizing four villages from the Islamic State. A video posted on social media showed Syrian rebels beating captured fighters allied with the Kurds.
At least 35 civilians were killed, according to activists. The escalation of Turkey's involvement in the Syrian civil war last week aimed to help the Syrian rebels drive the Islamic State group out of the border town of Jarablus. But it also is aimed at U.S.-allied Kurdish forces that have gained control in recent months of most of the territory along the Turkey-Syria border.
Sunday's clashes came a day after a rocket attack on two Turkish tanks killed a Turkish soldier and injured three others. Turkey, which is wrestling with Kurdish insurgents within its border, blamed the attack on Kurdish forces. They were Turkey's first casualties since dispatching tanks and special forces units, backed by U.S. and Turkish fighter jets, into Syria on Wednesday
The fighting pits Turkey, a NATO ally, against a U.S.-backed proxy that is the most effective ground force battling Islamic State militants in Syria in the 5-year-old civil war. It leaves Washington in the tough spot of having to choose between two of its allied forces, and is likely to divert resources from the fight against the Islamic State.
A spokesman for a Syrian rebel group said the Turkish-backed offensive will continue south of Jarablus to clear Islamic State and Kurdish forces from northeastern Aleppo. Turkish leaders have vowed to drive both the Islamic State and the militias, the Kurdish People's Protection Units, away from the border.
Turkey's military said Sunday its warplanes killed 25 Kurdish "terrorists" and destroyed five buildings used by the fighters in response to attacks on advancing Turkish-backed rebels in the Jarablus area.
Various factions of the Turkey-backed Syrian rebels said they had seized several villages and towns from Kurdish-led forces south of Jarablus, including Amarneh, where fighting was fiercest in recent days.
The Kurdish-led forces "must pull back to the east of the Euphrates. We will fight all terrorist groups, including [the Kurdish-led fighters] ... in all of northeast Aleppo," said Capt. Abdel-Salam Abdel-Razzak, a spokesman for the Nour el-Din el-Zinki group.
Turkish-backed fighters will move south of Jarablus, toward Manbij and beyond, he said.
Earlier this month, the Kurdish-led Syria Democratic Forces crossed the Euphrates and drove Islamic State militants out of Manbij, a key supply hub south of Jarablus, after a 10-week campaign. Both Turkey and the United States have ordered the Kurdish militia to withdraw to the east bank of the river. Leaders say they have, but their units advise the Syrian Democratic Forces, and it is not clear if any remain west of the Euphrates.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombing killed at least 20 civilians and four Kurdish-led fighters in Beir Koussa, a village about nine miles south of Jarablus, and left another 15 dead in a village to the west.
Syrian Democratic Forces spokesman Shervan Darwish said the airstrikes and shelling began overnight and continued Sunday along the front line, killing many civilians in Beir Koussa and nearby areas. At least 20 to 25 Turkish airstrikes have hit areas south of Jarablus since Saturday, he said. He said the bombing also targeted the village of Amarneh and that 50 Turkish tanks were taking part.
"Turkey didn't come to fight ISIS, they came to fight us," said Darwish, who is an ethnic Kurd and served last year as the spokesman for Kurdish forces in the Syrian town of Kobani.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party condemned the attack on the village. It also condemned what it said was international silence regarding "Turkish occupation" of Syria.
The militia's senior command said in a statement that it was not engaging Turkish forces "despite the losses we suffer." It added that "to stabilize the north of the country, the goal remains fighting Daesh and not Turkish forces."
The state-owned Syrian Arab News Agency reported that 20 civilians were killed and 50 wounded by Turkish artillery and airstrikes, calling it "encroachment" on Syrian sovereignty under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State. Turkey is a leading backer of the rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, but both Ankara and Damascus share concerns over Kurdish ambitions for autonomy.
Information for this article was contributed by Dusan Stojanovic, Zeynep Bilginsoy, Sarah el Deeb and Mucahit Ceylan of The Associated Press; and by Sudarsan Raghavan and Zakaria Zakaria of The Washington Post.
A Section on 08/29/2016