ISLAMABAD—The United States has added four top Islamic terrorists operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan to its list of “Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” amid a resurgence of violence and border tensions in the area. The terrorist leaders hail from the Pakistani Taliban and an al-Qaeda branch in South Asia.
Both terrorist groups operate from Afghanistan, but they have hideouts in Pakistan’s mountainous northwest and elsewhere as well.
The State Department’s announcement on Thursday comes days after Pakistan’s Taliban movement, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, ended a monthslong ceasefire with Pakistan and resumed attacks across the country.
Amid threats from the terrorists, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry tightened security in public places and mosques on Friday. The TTP has asked its fighters to target security forces across the country. The terrorist group was behind the 2014 attack on a Peshawar school that killed 147 people, mostly schoolchildren.
The State Department said the terrorist designation would trigger sanctions against the four terrorist commanders who are from the TTP and al-Qaeda’s South Asian branch.
“As a result of these actions,” the statement said, “all property and interests in property of those designated [Thursday] that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked, and all U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in any transactions with them.”
The United States said the sanctioned individuals included Osama Mehmood, the head of al-Qaeda’s South Asia branch; Yahya Ghouri, the deputy chief of the al-Qaeda branch; and Muhammad Maruf, who is responsible for recruitment for the group.
It also designated the TTP’s leader, Qari Amjad, who oversees terrorist attacks in northwest Pakistan.
In a statement, the TTP denounced the U.S. measures.
The latest measures by the State Department come days after Gen. Asim Munir was appointed Pakistan’s new army chief, amid a spike in terrorist attacks on security forces in the country.
One of the key challenges faced by Gen. Munir is how to respond to the threat from Pakistan’s Taliban.
U.S. CENTCOM chief Gen. Erik Kurilla spoke via video teleconference with Gen. Munir to congratulate him on his new position, the spokesman for U.S. Central Command said in a statement. The two leaders discussed U.S.–Pakistan security cooperation, it added.
The TTP emerged after Pakistan’s government became a key ally of the United States in its war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. Navy SEALs operation in May 2011 in his hiding place in the garrison city of Abbottabad, not far from Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad.
Pakistani officials did not immediately comment on the new U.S. terrorism designations, but Islamabad has demanded Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers do more to prevent terrorists from operating within their country. The demand from Pakistan came after a deadly suicide bombing earlier this week that the TTP claimed. The attack targeted police protecting health workers distributing polio vaccines in Pakistan’s southwest.
The Pakistani Taliban are a separate group but allied with Afghanistan’s Taliban terrorist group, who has ruled Afghanistan since the United States and NATO troops withdrew last year. The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan emboldened their Pakistani allies, whose top leaders and fighters are hiding in the next door country.
