ISTANBUL — The wedding on Saturday night was winding down, and some guests had left. But the music was still playing and people were dancing in the narrow streets of Gaziantep, a city near the Syrian border.
Then a child — no more than 14 years old, Turkey’s president said later — meandered into the gathering and detonated a vest of explosives.
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.
The devastating bombing of the Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep killed more than 50 people, for which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Islamic State, the terrorist group that controls a swath of land straddling the frontier between Iraq and Syria.
“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.”
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.
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 Assad. At the outset of the war in 2011, Erdogan was confident that 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.
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.
Now, Turkey finds itself with three enemies in the Syrian civil war — 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, has also targeted Kurds within Turkey, as it apparently did on Saturday by striking the wedding.
Turkey is also reeling from a failed military coup last month that aimed to topple the government of Erdogan and left at least 240 people dead.
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 Erdogan pushed stronger economic ties with Syria.
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.
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 into focus again.
“We had just walked past the wedding and offered our good wishes when we heard the blast,” said Ibrahim Ates, a local man. “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 wounded, 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. In Kirkuk, Iraq, security officials pulled a suicide vest off a boy, according to Reuters.
The bride and groom on Saturday survived without serious injuries. 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.