Pahalgam terror attack: India's diplomatic win over Pakistan as UNSC report mentions TRF

New Delhi: India claimed a diplomatic victory over Pakistan after a report by a team of the United Nations Security Council took note of the claim of The Resistance Force (TRF) owning the responsibility for the April 22 carnage in Jammu and Kashmir.

The ‘Monitoring Team’ of the UNSC committee constituted for overseeing the sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Al Qaeda, Islamic State and other organisations, in its recent report, noted that the TRF had claimed responsibility for the killing of 26 people, mostly tourists, at Baisaran near Pahalgam in J&K immediately after the incident and had also published a photograph of the scene of the terrorist attack. It also noted that the TRF had repeated the claim of responsibility on April 23, a day after the killing, but had retracted the claim on April 26. “There was no further communication from TRF, and no other group claimed responsibility.”

The United States has also recently designated TRF as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), taking note of its claim, owning the responsibility for the April 22 killings in J&K. The Trump administration had also referred to the TRF as a proxy front of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organisation based in Pakistan and known for its links with global terrorist networks and for carrying out several attacks in India.

The mention of the TRF’s claims to own responsibility for the terrorist attack in an UNSC document is significant. China, a permanent member of the UNSC, had helped non-permanent Pakistan to remove any reference to the TRF and water down a statement the council had issued on April 25 condemning the killing.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, had even boasted about the “diplomatic success” in thwarting India’s bid to make the UNSC refer to the TRF in its statement on the killings.

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.

The reference to the TRF in the UNSC document punctured Pakistan’s strategy of having plausible deniability of its role in sponsoring terrorism in India — using secular and modern names, like “The Resistance Front” and “People Against Fascist Front”, for its jihadi proxies to divert attention from the LeT or the JeM and give an indigenous appearance to its terrorist activities in J&K, a source in New Delhi said. What added to the significance of India’s diplomatic victory over Pakistan was the fact that all decisions of the UNSC’s 1267 Sanctions Committee, including reports by Monitoring Teams, were adopted by consensus by the members of the Security Council.

The Monitoring Team, however, quoted “one member state” stating that the attack in J&K could not have happened without the LeT support, and that the LeT and TRF were linked. The Monitoring Team noted that “another member state” believed the attack had been carried out by TRF, which was synonymous with LeT. Another member state of the UNSC rejected the views reflected in the report and said that the LeT had been defunct, according to the Monitoring Team of the UNSC committee constituted to oversee the implementation of sanctions on the global terrorist networks.