Pakistan has already raised questions about Afghanistan’s sanctuary for the TTP. report from July 2020 stated there were 6,000 Pakistani fighters in Afghanistan, most affiliated with the TTP.) There has also been some speculation that the Afghan peace process might include, at some point, a separate Afghan-Pakistan deal, with Afghanistan denying safe haven to the TTP potentially in return for Pakistan denying sanctuary to the Haqqanis (though it is unclear whether that will be possible, or acceptable to Pakistan). Some have speculated that the TTP comeback may be linked with the Afghan peace process and Pakistan’s fencing of the border with Afghanistan, both of which threaten the group’s sanctuary in Afghanistan. The TTP, of course, maintains ties with the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida.
On the other end, the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, an ethnic protest movement that claims human rights violations against civilians by the Pakistani military during its operations against the Taliban, has alleged (without systematic proof) that “the Taliban are being allowed to return” to the tribal areas in a “secret deal with the military.”
Official Pakistani sources blamed India as “behind” the revival. Various breakaway factions pledged allegiance to the group last July, and there are reports of it making a comeback in at least six districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa “ with the intimidation of locals, targeted killings, and attacks on security forces.” The TTP is reported to have killed at least 40 security forces between March and September 2020. While this top-line picture in terms of number of attacks and casualties is clearly a positive one, the TTP has been regrouping since last summer. The operation is called Radd-ul-Fasaad, which literally means elimination of all strife.įigure: Terrorism-related fatalities in Pakistan Author’s graph Source: South Asia Terrorism Portal.
Since 2017, having largely routed the TTP (because of limited information access to the area, there are questions about how many terrorists were killed, versus simply displaced across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border), the military’s operation entered a new phase of “elimination” of militant groups. The Pakistani military’s Zarb-e-Azb operation (named for the sword of the Prophet Muhammad) began in 2014 - after a TTP attack on the Karachi airport that June - and increased in intensity after the Peshawar Army Public School attack of December that year, which killed more than 130 schoolchildren. Over the years, American drone strikes targeted and killed successive TTP leaders, including Baitullah Mehsud in 2009, Hakimullah Mehsud in 2013, and Mullah Fazlullah in 2018. This fall is largely due to the Pakistani army’s kinetic operations against the Pakistani Taliban - also known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) - which had been responsible for the majority of deaths of civilians and security forces since 2007, the year it formed officially as an umbrella organization of various militant groups.
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