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After denials Afghanistan’s caretaker government has finally accepted that it has arrested up to 40 Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) operatives, who were operating from their soil in Pakistan and are currently in jail.
The development comes after Pakistan strongly protested the Afghanistan government by summoning its envoy after a well-choreographed recent attack in Pakistan’s Dera Ismail Khan on security forces that martyred over 20 security forces.
Pakistan had been asking Kabul to take action against fugitive elements such as those in Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, as well as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
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.
Balochistan information minister Jan Achakzai in a press conference demanded from the Afghan government to hand over all the detained TTP terrorists to Pakistani authorities and take action against their sanctuaries inside Afghanistan.
The admission of action against the TTP operatives by the Afghan government is a good sign this and other strong and concrete steps by the Afghan’s Taliban government to stop TTP operatives from attacking Pakistan can mend the ties between both countries and this can be a good sign for enduring peace in the region.
