Pakistan to appeal to Taliban leader over police mosque bombing

• PM's aide says delegations will be sent to Tehran and Kabul.
• Pakistani officials will hold talks with Hibatullah Akhundzada.
• Detectives blame outlawed TTP for Police Lines mosque blast.

ISLAMABAD: Islamabad will ask the secretive supreme leader of Afghanistan's Taliban to rein in militants in Pakistan after a suicide bombing killed scores of police in a mosque, officials said Saturday.

Since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul, Pakistan has witnessed a dramatic uptick in attacks in regions bordering Afghanistan, where militants use rugged terrain to stage assaults and escape detection.

Detectives have blamed an affiliate of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — the most notorious militant outfit in the area — for the Monday blast in Peshawar which killed 84 people inside a fortified police headquarters.

The TTP share common lineage and ideals with the Afghan Taliban, led by Hibatullah Akhundzada who issues edicts from his hideaway in the southern city of Kandahar.

Special Assistant to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Faisal Karim Kundi, said delegations would be sent to Tehran and Kabul to "ask them to ensure that their soil is not used by terrorists against Pakistan".

A senior Pakistani police official in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Monday's blast took place, told AFP the Kabul delegation would hold "talks with the top brass".

"When we say top brass, it means [...] Afghan Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada," he said on condition of anonymity.

Afghan officials did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.

But on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi warned Pakistan should "not pass the blame to others".

"They should see the problems in their own house," he said. "Afghanistan should not be blamed."

Since the ultra-conservatives seized Kabul in 2021, relations with Pakistan have soured, in part over the resurgence of the TTP.

The TTP — formed in 2007 by militants who splintered off from the Afghan Taliban — once held sway over swathes of northwest Pakistan but were routed by an army offensive after 2014.

But over the first year of Taliban rule, Pakistan witnessed a 50% uptick in militant attacks, concentrated in the border regions with Afghanistan and Iran, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies.

The TTP, notorious for shooting schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, has "arguably benefitted the most of all the foreign extremist groups in Afghanistan from the Taliban takeover", a UN Security Council report said in May 2022.

Last year Kabul brokered peace talks between Islamabad and the TTP but the shaky truce collapsed.