While, as part of its new operational strategy, the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a terrorist organisation dubbed by the state as Fitna-tul-Khawarij, has started carrying out massive terrorist attacks in Pakhtun-inhabited parts of Balochistan, as is evident from the July 6 Mangi Dam attack in Ziarat near Quetta in which 27 police officials were martyred, the TTP has also refurbished its overall operational plans. At the same time, the group is facing growing factionalism.
Under its new operational strategy, the TTP has established strong links with Baloch separatist armed groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF). Another very important strand of the refurbished operational strategy of the TTP is to expand the theatre of its operations across the length and breadth of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. It may be mentioned that since the resurgence of the TTP in 2022, the group has been carrying out terrorist attacks on security forces in the southern parts of KP, stretching from Kohat district, southwest of Peshawar, to Tank and Dera Ismail Khan districts in southernmost KP, bordering Balochistan.
For instance, on July 15, the TTP carried out a three-pronged attack on police in Lower Dir district, approximately 550 kilometres away from Dera Ismail Khan and the nearby contiguous TTP heartland of South Waziristan district of KP. In the Dir attack, at least three policemen were martyred and several others injured during a combing operation in the area. It was an extensive search-and-strike operation by the police, during which special teams searched and cleared three valleys. A few days earlier, militants belonging to the TTP emerged after years of absence in the high valleys of Swat, an adjoining district of Lower Dir. Surprisingly, Pakistani media carried rare images of Taliban militants in the previously unknown upper valleys of Swat. Thus, expanding its operations once again to the northern parts of KP appears to be a key component of the TTP’s new strategy.
It must be noted that the TTP has been making a strong comeback since the Afghan Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021. The resurgence of the TTP since that time has been attributed to several factors, including strong support from the Afghan Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The TTP’s entire command and control structure relocated to Afghanistan in the face of massive military operations by Pakistan’s security forces following the loathsome December 16, 2014 terrorist attack on a school in Peshawar, in which around 150 schoolchildren and staff members were butchered by the TTP.
The Afghan Taliban’s support for the TTP has taken various forms. Firstly, the Afghan Taliban set free all TTP inmates from Afghan jails who had been arrested during the rule of President Ashraf Ghani. Secondly, it provided the TTP with a free field to prepare for terrorist attacks across the border inside Pakistan, including by providing them with multiple sanctuaries along the 2,640-kilometre-long Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Thirdly, it insisted that Pakistan enter into dialogue with the TTP to pave the way for the return of its leaders and fighters to their ancestral areas in Pakistan. Fourthly, it provided logistical and financial support to the TTP.
Another very important factor behind the resurgence of the TTP since 2021 has been profound political instability, or rather a political crisis, in Pakistan. The TTP’s resurgence since 2022, particularly in KP province and specifically in its Merged Tribal Districts (MTDs), has been facilitated by deep political crisis and instability in the country. For instance, since the removal of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022, Pakistan has experienced a deep political crisis. As Mr Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) have enjoyed massive public support in KP, particularly in the MTDs, while also governing the province, the TTP has taken huge advantage of the political crisis to carry out its deadly activities in KP. Before this period, there had been an almost complete stoppage of terrorist attacks by the Afghanistan-based TTP.
The TTP’s new operational strategy also includes making certain key adjustments to its longstanding and previous positions. In this regard, what is quite obvious to observe is that the TTP has stopped declaring the Pakistani government a stooge of the United States since the latter withdrew all its troops from Afghanistan in 2021. Such propaganda is no longer tenable and could not win supporters for the TTP among the masses. The group had previously used this propaganda as a major justification for its emergence, arguing that the Pakistani state was siding with the United States in the War on Terror and was thus committing a ‘sin’ in its view.
With this adjustment in its propaganda, there has also been a major change in the group’s demands. Of late, the TTP has apparently given up its longstanding demand for the enforcement of Shariah, or Islamic rule, in Pakistan and for carrying out large-scale terrorist attacks across the country for this purpose. Such a demand does not appear plausible in an Islamic country, while making it cannot win widespread support across Pakistan because the group became notorious for its hundreds of massive attacks between 2008 and 2016, in which thousands upon thousands of Pakistanis, mostly Pakhtuns, were killed.
The TTP has now reduced its demands from the Pakistani state to the demerger, or reversal of the merger, of the Pakhtun tribal lands — the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) — with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the tribal lands along the border with Afghanistan. Obviously, the TTP is in search of solid ground to use as a base because remaining in Afghanistan is not sustainable, particularly as the group’s fighters have also come under heavy attacks by the Pakistan Air Force inside Afghanistan. Therefore, the group appears to believe that it would be better to convince the Pakistani government to provide it with sanctuaries in the former FATA so that it can gain breathing space.
Providing the TTP with any space within Pakistan yet again would be a grave mistake by Pakistani authorities, as the group would only use it for its resurgence. It is also important to note that, along with adjustments to its demands as part of its operational strategy, the TTP also appears to have adjusted its ideological positioning. Of late, the group has started presenting itself as a more Pakhtun nationalist force instead of a Pakistani nationalist group or, more importantly, a purely religious outfit.
This strand of the TTP’s strategy is aimed at taking advantage of deep anger and frustration among Pakhtuns in Pakistan towards the government over decades-long counterterrorism, specifically anti-TTP, military operations and the displacement of millions of Pakhtuns from their homes.
Recently, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a strong faction within the TTP, parted ways with the parent organisation, blaming the TTP leadership under its chief, Noor Wali Mehsud, for the elimination of Umar Khalid Khurasani, one of its former key commanders. All Pakistani Taliban organisations that are part of the TTP have pledged allegiance to the Afghan Taliban chief, Haibatullah Akhundzada. Although most TTP factions have their own organisational structures, they share common objectives. The most important objective is to follow in the footsteps of the Afghan Taliban, which captured power in Afghanistan, and replicate that model in Pakistan.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has announced that it is reviving its own organisational structure and separating itself from the TTP, claiming that it has nothing to do with the activities of the TTP anymore. In fact, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has refused to accept the Afghan Taliban’s advice against carrying out large-scale terrorist attacks in Pakistan, a position that the TTP has partially agreed to. However, the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction has strong reservations about this strategy.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar is of the opinion that the TTP must carry out attacks not only in the Pakhtun-dominated KP province but also in other provinces and Islamabad. Most Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militants hail from Pakistan’s Mohmand district, including its slain chief, Umar Khalid Khurasani.
While the TTP’s revised operational strategy has made it more lethal in its attacks, the factionalism within the organisation has provided the country’s counterterrorism authorities with a significant opportunity to create further cracks within the group and weaken its operational capabilities.