Pakistan calls on Afghanistan to handover TTP militants in its custody

QUETTA: Pakistan’s caretaker government in the southwestern Balochistan province on Monday called on Afghanistan to ‘handover’ militants belonging to the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), a day after Kabul said it had arrested up to 40 TTP fighters in the last year.

Pakistan and Afghanistan share a 2,600-kilometer-long border which mainly passes through the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southwestern Balochistan provinces but the relationship between the neighbors has been strained for decades. Ties have become particularly tense in recent months amid an uptick in attacks in Pakistan that it blames on TTP militants harboring in Afghanistan.

The Afghan Taliban-led government in Kabul has always denied it allows Afghan soil to be used against any other country. But in a rare admission, a spokesperson for the Afghan ministry of interior, Abdul Mateen Qani, said last week 35-40 TTP militants were currently under arrest in Afghanistan.

“We demand from the Afghan government to hand over all the detained TTP terrorists to Pakistani authorities and take action against their sanctuaries inside Afghanistan,” Balochistan information minister Jan Achakzai said at a press conference.

“Pakistan was witnessing attacks during the presence of the US Army in Afghanistan, but since Taliban came to power, the number of attacks in Pakistan have increased with more intensity.”

A six-man suicide squad drove an explosive-laden truck into a military camp in northwest Pakistan last Tuesday, killing at least 23 soldiers, the army said, the heaviest death toll in a single attack in years, less than two months ahead of elections. Pakistan issued a demarche to the Afghan embassy in Islamabad over the attack and demanded action.

The gun and bomb attack, which was claimed by a militant group believed to be an offshoot of the TTP, comes as political watchers have already voiced concerns about holding the vote, scheduled for Feb. 8, as militant attacks have been on the rise in the country’s northwest and southwest.

In response to rising attacks, Pakistan in October announced it would expel all undocumented foreigners in the country, a policy that has disproportionately hit Afghans who form the largest number of migrants to Pakistan. Since the announcement of the expulsion drive, over 450,000 have returned to their country or been deported.

In an op-ed published in the Daily Telegraph on Sunday, Pakistani Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said at least 16 Afghan nationals had been found involved in suicide attacks inside Pakistan in the last two years, while 65 militants shot dead by Pakistani security forces had been identified as Afghans:

“No responsible government can ignore such concerns. Whenever we raised this with the interim Afghan government, they advised us to ‘look inwards’ … We can no longer continue to compromise our national security by accommodating such huge numbers of undocumented individuals.”