Pakistan has welcomed a United States decision to add the militant outfit Jamaatul Ahrar (JuA), splinter group of the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to its list of global terrorists, triggering sanctions against a group that has staged multiple attacks on civilians, religious minorities and soldiers.
“Pakistan has long requested a strict action against the TTP and their like who operate in Afghanistan, and they have planned and launched a number of attacks in Pakistan while operating from there,” Foreign Office spokesman Nafees Zakaria said at a weekly briefing on Thursday.
Jamaatul Ahrar has claimed responsibility for at least five major attacks in Pakistan since December, including the Easter Sunday bombing in a public park that killed 70 people in the eastern city of Lahore.
READ MORE: US designates TTP-affiliate Jamaatul Ahrar as “terrorist group”
It is a splinter faction of the Pakistani Taliban movement that has also declared loyalty to Islamic State’s leadership in the Middle East. The group also claimed responsibility for the killing of two Pakistani employees of the US Consulate in the northwestern city of Peshawar in early March.
Later in that month, it carried out a suicide assault at the Gulshan-i-Iqbal amusement park in Lahore that killed more than 70 people — nearly half of them women and children — and injured hundreds more. The Easter Sunday attack was the deadliest terrorist attack in Pakistan since December 2014.
The US State Department announced that the designation automatically imposed on the group and its leaders all sanctions that applied to foreign persons and groups determined to have committed, or posing a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism.
As a result of these designations, all property subject to US jurisdiction in which Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has any interest is blocked and US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with the group.
The Pentagon’s announcement that it will not pay Pakistan $300 million in military reimbursements did not evoke a strong reaction from the Pakistan Foreign Office.
However, spokesperson Zakaria in response to a question recounted the sacrifices the country has made in the war against terrorism.
Pakistan has suffered more than any other country in the war on terror both in terms of human and economic losses, Radio Pakistan quoted the FO spokesperson as saying.
He said 60,000 people including 6,000 security personnel had lost their lives during the war on terror, adding that the US payment under the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) was helpful to the Pakistani offensive.
Operation Zarb-i-Azb has seen a resounding success due to which bastions of terrorists in the tribal areas have been cleared, the spokesperson stated.