ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Munir Akram, has urged the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to compel Taliban authorities in Afghanistan to sever ties with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and prevent cross-border attacks carried out by the group, state media reported on Saturday.
Islamabad blames the surge in attacks on neighboring Afghanistan, saying Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, leaders have taken refuge there and run camps to train militants to launch attacks inside Pakistan. Kabul says rising violence in Pakistan is a domestic issue for Islamabad and it does not allow militants to operate on its territory.
The TTP pledges allegiance to, and gets its name from, the Afghan Taliban, but is not directly a part of the group that now rules Afghanistan. Its stated aim is to impose Islamic religious law in Pakistan, as the Taliban have done in Afghanistan.
“I urge the UNSC to call on the Taliban government to sever its links with the TTP and its associates, prevent them from carrying out cross-border attacks against Pakistan, disarm the TTP terrorists, capture their leadership and hand them over to Pakistan,” the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) quoted Akram as saying in an address to the 15-member council to which the South Asian state was recently elected as a non-permanent member.
“The impunity which some of these terrorist groups seem to enjoy within Afghanistan poses a dire and direct threat to all of Afghanistan’s neighbors as well as to the international community.”
Akram said the Taliban government did not act “decisively” to halt the TTP’s militant activities despite assurances.
“The highest priority – for the international community, for Afghanistan’s neighbors and for Afghanistan itself – remains the elimination of terrorism within and from Afghanistan,” the envoy added.
The TTP is responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks in Pakistan, including on churches, schools and the shooting of Malala Yousafzai, who survived the 2012 attack after she was targeted for her campaign against the Taliban’s efforts to deny women education.
Pakistani forces were able to effectively dismantle the TTP and kill most of its top leadership in a string of military operations from 2014 onwards in the tribal areas, driving most of the fighters into neighboring Afghanistan, where Islamabad says they have regrouped.
