ISLAMABAD: Hanging over the recent eruption of fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the most serious clash between the neighbours in decades, is the spectre of a militant leader who, Islamabad says, is directing near-daily attacks on its soil.
An uneasy ceasefire took hold on Wednesday, but Pakistan’s main grievance endures: the presence of Noor Wali Mehsud in Afghanistan, along with his top lieutenants.
Last week, he survived an airstrike in Kabul. He appeared in a video Thursday to prove he was still alive. Mehsud said in the video that he was appearing to refute reports of his death. Pakistani security officials and militants had previously assessed that he had probably survived. Mehsud, in the video, claimed he was in Pakistan. The footage was shot on a hilltop; Reuters could not verify the location.
Pakistan has not officially owned the airstrike, the first in Kabul since the successful 2022 US targeting of Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Mehsud took over the leadership of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2018 after his three predecessors were killed by US drone strikes. By then, Pakistani army operations had largely driven the group out of their former strongholds and into Afghanistan.
He has revived the group, transformed its strategy and united warring factions with diplomatic skill, analysts say. Trained as a religious scholar, he also took up an ideological battle. The Taliban’s 2021 takeover next door gave the TTP freer movement and greater access to weapons, Islamabad says, and attacks inside Pakistan escalated — especially in the northwest bordering Afghanistan.
In the past, the TTP struck civilian targets, like mosques and markets, including killing more than 130 children in a 2014 school assault.
Pakistan’s military says the TTP has distorted religion and that it is supported by India.
Mehsud fuses religious justification with nationalism.
Abdul Sayed, an independent expert on the region’s militancy, said Mehsud claims to speak for the Pashtun ethnic group that lives in northwest Pakistan and also in Afghanistan – the Afghan Taliban are largely Pashtun.
“Mehsud continues his efforts to reshape the group into an armed movement fighting, as he claims, for the rights of Pashtun tribespeople,” said Sayed. “In pursuit of a government system similar to that of the Afghan Taliban.”
Yet the TTP has negligible public support in the northwest or elsewhere in the country, analysts say.
In unofficial talks with the Pakistani authorities in recent days, held through tribal intermediaries, the militants demanded the imposition of their brand of Islamic law in the part of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, the exit of the army from that region, and their (TTP’s) return there. The authorities refused.
