Home Latest News Pakistan to Appeal to Taliban’s Akhundzada to End Cross-border Terrorism

Pakistan to Appeal to Taliban’s Akhundzada to End Cross-border Terrorism

Government also plans to send a delegation to Tehran to seek assurances that foreign soil will not be used by terrorists against Pakistan

by AFP

File photo

Islamabad will ask the supreme leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban to rein in militants in Pakistan after a suicide bombing killed scores of police at a mosque, officials said on Saturday.

Since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul, Pakistan has witnessed a dramatic uptick in attacks in regions bordering Afghanistan, where militants use rugged terrain to stage assaults and escape detection. Detectives have blamed an affiliate of the Pakistani Taliban for Monday’s blast in Peshawar, which killed over 80 people inside the high-security Police Lines area.

The Pakistani Taliban share common lineage and ideals with the Afghan Taliban, led by Hibatullah Akhundzada, who issues edicts from his hideaway in Kandahar.

Special Assistant to the P.M. Faisal Karim Kundi said delegations would be sent to Tehran and Kabul to “ask them to ensure that their soil is not used by terrorists against Pakistan.” A senior Pakistani police official in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa told AFP the Kabul delegation would hold “talks with the top brass.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity he added: “When we say top brass, it means… Afghan Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada.”

Afghan officials did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment. However, on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi warned Pakistan to “not pass the blame to others.” Stressing that Afghanistan should not be blamed, he added: “They [Pakistan] should see the problems in their own house.”

During the 20-year U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan, Islamabad was accused of giving covert support to the Afghan Taliban even as the country proclaimed a military alliance with the United States. But since the Taliban seized Kabul in 2021, relations with Pakistan have soured, in part over the resurgence of the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The TTP—formed in 2007 by Pakistani militants who splintered off from the Afghan Taliban—once held sway over swathes of northwest Pakistan but were routed by an Army offensive after 2014. But over the first year of Taliban rule, Pakistan witnessed a 50 percent uptick in militant attacks, concentrated in the border regions with Afghanistan and Iran, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies.

The TTP, notorious for shooting schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, has “arguably benefitted the most of all the foreign extremist groups in Afghanistan from the Taliban takeover,” a U.N. Security Council report said in May 2022. Last year Kabul brokered peace talks between Islamabad and the TTP but the shaky truce collapsed in November, with the TTP issuing a statement directing its fighters to target security officials “wherever they can.”

Related Articles

Leave a Comment