Taliban outfit faces ban

* Interior minister confirms matter under consideration

By Azaz Syed

ISLAMABAD: The government has decided to ban Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a militant outfit that recently emerged in the insurgency-hit Tribal Areas, Daily Times learnt on Thursday.

Sources told Daily Times that the decision had been made on the recommendation of top officials of the country’s security apparatus.

The government has banned 18 militant outfits and put two on the watch list since 2001. Caretaker Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz Khan told Daily Times that no decision to ban TTP had been made as yet but the matter was under the government’s serious consideration.

“Yes, we’re seriously considering the ban but a decision to this effect will come only after a thorough examination of all the aspects concerned,” he said. On December 14, around 40 local Taliban leaders announced to form the TTP in a bid to centralise their command.

Sources said that intelligence agencies had already been tasked to check out the TTP infrastructure including its main leaders, financiers and supporters in the Tribal Areas and elsewhere.

Sources said the government had already launched an unannounced crackdown on TTP leaders and activists across the country. Forty Taliban leaders from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and some normally governed districts of the NWFP had set up TTP, a centralised organisation under warlord Baitullah Mehsud of South Waziristan “to enforce Sharia, to unite against the NATO forces in Afghanistan and do defensive jihad against the Pakistan Army”.