India to apprise UNSC committee of LeT front TRF's involvement in Pahalgam terror attack

New Delhi: India has launched a renewed attempt to get The Resistance Force designated as a terrorist organisation by the United Nations Security Council and placed under international sanctions in view of its role in the April 22 carnage in Jammu and Kashmir and its links with the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba based in Pakistan.

A team of counterterrorism and legal experts from New Delhi reached the United Nations headquarters in New York to renew the attempts to get the Security Council to take note of the links of The Resistance Force (TRF) with global terrorist networks of Al Qaeda and ISIL (Da'esh) through the LeT of Pakistan. The team had a meeting with the Monitoring Team of the 1267 sanctions committee of the UN Security Council on Wednesday.

The members of the team will also meet with the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) and the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) over the next few days, a source in New Delhi said.

Soon after 26 people – mostly tourists – were killed at a meadow in Baisaran near Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir by a gang of Pakistani and Pakistan-trained terrorists on April 22, the TRF claimed responsibility for the attack. The investigation by the agencies of India into the carnage found “communication nodes” of terrorists in and to Pakistan.

The TRF is a front of the LeT, designated by the United Nations as an organisation linked to the global terrorist network. India had given inputs about the TRF in the half-yearly reports it submitted to the monitoring team of the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee in May and November 2024, pointing out its role as a cover for terrorist organisations based in Pakistan.

The 1267 Sanctions Committee of the Security Council oversees the implementation of the UN sanctions – assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo – against individuals and entities associated with Al-Qaida, ISIL, or the Taliban.

Though the LeT came under the UN sanctions in May 2005, it continued to orchestrate attacks in India from Pakistan. It plotted and perpetrated many attacks, including the November 26-28, 2008, carnage in Mumbai, killing 166 people and leaving many others injured.

New Delhi informed the monitoring team of the 1267 sanctions panel of the UN in December 2023 that the LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), another anti-India terrorist organisation based in Pakistan, had been operating through small terror groups such as the TRF.

With China a permanent member and Pakistan a non-permanent member of the 15-member UN Security Council, New Delhi is likely to face difficulty in getting the TRF designated as a terrorist organisation. Pakistan, backed by China, in fact pressured to remove references to TRF in the April 25 UN Security Council press statement on the carnage in J&K

China helped Pakistan water down the council’s April 25 statement on the latest carnage in J&K, removing a reference to the role of the TRF.