ISTANBUL: Turkey on Tuesday pounded IS jihadists in Syria with new artillery strikes as expectations grew of a major Ankara-backed offensive against the group after a deadly suicide bombing on its soil.

With tensions flaring on the Turkey-Syria border following the bombing in the nearby city of Gaziantep that left 54 people dead, Turkish howitzers on Monday hit jihadist and Kurdish rebel targets across the frontier.

Turkey has been shaken by one of the bloodiest years in its modern history, with a string of attacks by IS jihadists and Kurdish militants and the botched July 15 coup.

In new fighting on Tuesday, two mortar rounds fired from an IS-controlled area in Syria hit the south-eastern Turkish town of Karkamis while three more hit the centre of the Turkish border town of Kilis, the state-run Anadolu news agency said. There were no reports of injuries although 21 people in Kilis have been killed by fire from Syria in recent months.

Turkish artillery responded to the fire on Karkamis by hitting four IS positions around the jihadist-controlled Syrian town of Jarablus with around 60 shells. The army also responded to the fire on Kilis.

The shelling came as activists said hundreds of Ankara-backed rebels were preparing an offensive against the IS to seize control of Jarablus.

But this could potentially put them on collision course with the militia of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) which Ankara vehemently opposes and who also have designs on Jarablus after seizing the strategic Manbij area in northern Syria from IS.

Rami Abdul Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the “Turkish shelling in Syria aimed to prevent the advance of troops backed by Kurds from Manbij towards Jarablus”.

He told AFP the commander of Kurdish-dominated forces headed to Jarablus, Abdel Satar al-Jader, was also “assassinated” on Monday after announcing he planned to resist the Turkish advance. There was no confirmation of this from Turkish sources.

Backtrack on ‘IS child bomber’ claim

The attack in Gaziantep on a Kurdish wedding party for a young couple has horrified the country, with the majority of the 54 victims aged under 18 and including children as young as four.

But there is confusion as to who was behind the attack, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan initially saying the suicide bomber was a child aged 12-14 acting on the orders of the IS. However Yildirim on Monday said Turkey still had no clue who carried out the attack and said all “rumours” over the age and affiliation of the bomber should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Hurriyet said the authorities still suspected the IS was behind the attack as the main line of inquiry, with investigators taking DNA samples in Gaziantep from the families of possible IS suspects.

Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2016