The banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) wants to push the army and government of Pakistan out of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by launching brutal attacks, and establishing Sharia in the province, according to a US State Department report.
TTP has been using the tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to train and launch attacks across Pakistan over the past decade.
According to the existing reports, the outlawed TTP and other militant groups have safe havens in Pashtun areas bordering the Afghan-Pakistan border. It is also believed that TTP supported the Afghan Taliban in their two-decade-long fight against the US invasion of Afghanistan.
Now with the Afghan Taliban in power, the group provides sanctuaries to their ideological twin the TTP, on Afghan soil, according to many Pakistani politicians and political experts.
Besides getting support from their ideological twin in Afghanistan, the TTP has access to Al-Qaeda’s global terrorist network and its members’ operational expertise – which allows the insurgent group to skillfully conduct attacks throughout Pakistan.
The report also highlights that besides TTP, other terrorist groups including the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), and the militant Islamic State-Khorasan group (IS-K) are focused to conduct attacks on Pakistan.
Meanwhile, since the Afghan Taliban seized power in Kabul in August 2021, the security situation has deteriorated in Pakistan. The militant groups have intensified their offensives across the country mainly targeting Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan among the other provinces in Pakistan.
In response to the rising threats of terrorism, the army and civil leaders of Pakistan authorized the security institutions to decisively react against the terror groups. In the meantime, the US and Pakistan held a joint security conference in the United States in the recent past to assess the alternatives and cooperate in the fight against terrorism and militancy.
