ISLAMABAD —
Pakistan’s Taliban said Monday they have called off a shaky ceasefire agreed
with the government in June and ordered fighters to stage attacks across the
country.
اضافة اعلان
The
Tehreek–e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a separate entity from the Taliban in
Afghanistan but sharing a similar Islamist ideology, have been responsible for
hundreds of attacks and thousands of deaths since emerging in 2007.
They agreed to a
truce earlier this year after Afghanistan’s new Taliban rulers took a prominent
role in brokering peace talks, but negotiations made little progress and there
were frequent breaches.
“We ... have
shown our continued patience so that the negotiation process is not sabotaged,”
the TTP said in a statement.
“But the army
and intelligence agencies do not stop and continue the attacks, so now our
retaliatory attacks will also start across the country.”
Less than two
weeks ago the
TTP claimed an ambush that killed six policemen in northwest
Pakistan, claiming they were plotting a “raid” on their base in the area.
Since Friday the
military has been patrolling the area in an attempt to root out militants, with
helicopter gunships shelling their hideouts.
Faltering peace
The TTP was founded in 2007 by Pakistani extremists who fought
alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s before opposing Islamabad’s
support for American intervention there after September 11, 2001.
For a time they
held vast tracts of Pakistan’s rugged tribal belt, imposing radical Islamic law
and patrolling territory just 140km from the Pakistan capital.
The Pakistani
military came down hard after 2014 when militants raided a school for children
of army personnel and killed nearly 150 people, most of them pupils.
Its fighters
were largely routed into neighboring Afghanistan, but Islamabad claims the
Taliban in Kabul are now giving the TTP a foothold to stage assaults across the
border.
In the year
since the Taliban took over
Afghanistan, Pakistan has seen a 50 per cent surge
in militant attacks, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS).
Lawmakers and business owners in northwest Pakistan
have also told AFP that instances of TTP blackmail in the area have increased.
The presence of
militants in the area is a deeply sensitive topic for Islamabad, which has long
struggled to establish a writ there.
Analyst Saad Khan, a
Peshawar-based retired brigadier, played down the significance of the TTP
statement, saying the ceasefire was barely observed anyway.
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