In a first, UNSC sanctions team names TRF in report

The Resistance Front (TRF) twice claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam terrorist attack before retracting, said the Monitoring Team (MT) of the UN Security Council (UNSC) Sanctions Committee in its latest report mentioning for the first time the name of the Pakistan-based terror group that was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the US earlier this month.

Indian officials described the development as a diplomatic victory saying this was the first time the group, a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) proxy, had been named in any UN document. Participating in the Operation Sindoor debate in Rajya Sabha, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said that Indian diplomacy had been successful in getting the UNSC monitoring team to accept that “TRF today is a terrorist entity”.

There was no mention of the 2019 Pulwama attack in the same report that appeared in July that year. India has been working with the monitoring team since December 2023 for a UN ban on the TRF, providing inputs about TRF-LeT links, but these efforts are unlikely to bear fruit at least till the end of Pakistan’s non-permanent membership of the Security Council.

One of the ways in which Pakistan diluted the UNSC condemnation of the Pahalgam attack carried out by, as union home minister Amit Shah said in Parliament this week, terrorists from across the LoC was to get the mention of TRF removed from the statement.

The July 29 dated report took note of the photograph published by the TRF of the attack site and said that after the group retracted its claim, there was no further communication from its members and no other group claimed responsibility.

“Regional relations remain fragile. There is a risk that terrorist groups may exploit these regional tensions,” said the report.

Jaishankar highlighted that the MT report mentioned the TRF, saying that member states noted that one member state said the Pahalgam attack could not have happened without LeT’s support and there’s a relationship between LeT and TRF.

“Another member state said attack was carried out by TRF, which is synonymous with LeT. And it mentions that Pakistan actually opposed it and said LeT was defunct. So, we were able to get into UN a recognition that TRF today is a proxy for the LeT and is responsible for Pahalgam,” said Jaishankar.

According to Indian government sources, this development is significant as all decisions of the 1267 Sanctions Committee, including MT reports, are adopted by consensus by UNSC members. “Pakistan’s strategy of plausible deniability - using secular and modern names like The Resistance Front and People Against Fascist Front for its jihadi proxies to divert attention from LeT/JeM and give an indigenous appearance to its terrorist activities in Jammu & Kashmir - now stands punctured,” said an official, adding that the development also marks the first mention of LeT/Pakistan-based terror groups in the report since 2019.

The official said that in 2024, on 2 occasions, the MEA had provided inputs to the MT on the activities of the TRF and its linkages to the LeT. “An MEA-led inter-ministerial delegation briefed the MT and other senior UN officials in New York in May 2024 and also shared a dossier on TRF,” he said, adding that the development also reflects close cooperation between India and like-minded countries in the Security Council.