[ Jamestown Foundation ] Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s Latest Merger Enables Renewed Attacks in Pakistan

The Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), announced on August 7 that it had merged with a former al-Qaeda-affiliated, anti-state Pakistani jihadist group once led by Ustad Aslam (Umar Media, August 7). It becomes the ninth jihadist group to join the TTP since July 2020. Among the other groups are three TTP splinters, two al-Qaeda affiliates, a faction of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), and two jihadist groups from South Waziristan (Terrorism Monitor, January 5). The al-Qaeda affiliates led by the late Amjad Farooqi and Ustad Ahmad Farooq both played significant roles for al-Qaeda in Pakistan after 9/11.

Although Ustad Aslam is highly respected and adored by the TTP, he had never merged his group into TTP. Thus, the current move of the Ustad Aslam group to join the TTP shows that the organization might have achieved a level of strength and trust that had not existed when it was at the peak of its operations, before it splintered in 2014. A senior Pakistani journalist and expert on the TTP, Ihsan Tipu Mehsud, argues that the Ustad Aslam group’s merger with the TTP is at least symbolically significant, if not also operationally. [29] These groups have suffered immensely in the wake of military operations across Pakistan and are scattered, isolated, and lack an operational command and control mechanism. They are in desperate need to find refuge with like-minded organizations. And in such a desperate time, the TTP once again came forward to embrace the Ustad Aslam group.

As a result, Ustad Aslam group’s merger with the TTP brings the most skilled and experienced experts of urban terrorism under control of TTP leadership. The group has trainers who know sophisticated terrorist techniques and helped al-Qaeda deal its heaviest blows to the Pakistani state and its military. The intense Pakistani counterterrorism campaigns and the U.S. drone strikes have damaged its organizational cohesion and scattered its operational network inside Pakistan. However, the recently strengthened TTP now has the resources and urban network to strike Pakistan with deadly attacks like in the past.