India steps up efforts to include Lashkar-e-Taiba front TRF in UNSC terror list

India has redoubled efforts for listing The Resistance Front (TRF), a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) that claimed the Pahalgam terror attack, as a terror organisation by the UN Security Council to increase pressure on Pakistan, people familiar with the matter said.

Efforts for sanctioning the TRF, which were already underway, have gained urgency following the heightening of tensions between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack of April 22 that killed 26 civilians, the people said on condition of anonymity.

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Indian officials are not buying TRF’s efforts to distance itself from the attack after initially claiming responsibility last month, with foreign secretary Vikram Misri saying the group was asked “to back off from this claim” by its handlers in Pakistan once they realised the gravity of the situation.

In recent years, India has worked with its strategic partners in the UN Security Council, mainly the US and France, for listing several Pakistan-based terrorist groups and individuals, including leaders of the LeT and proxies for the terror organisation founded by Hafiz Saeed.

“The efforts for listing the TRF have been on for some time. We will provide more information to give a fresh push for the listing,” one of the people cited above said.

India provided inputs about the TRF’s role as a proxy for Pakistan-based terror groups in half-yearly reports to the monitoring team for the UN’s 1267 Sanctions Committee in May and November 2024. Before this, the monitoring team was informed by the Indian side in December 2023 about the LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) operating in Jammu and Kashmir through groups such as the TRF.

“We are going to be meeting with the [monitoring] team again very soon and we will be providing an update to the information that we have provided earlier,” Misri told a media briefing on Thursday.

The people cited above said India’s position has been strengthened by evidence that has emerged of the links between terror groups and the Pakistani military following the strikes on terrorist infrastructure under Operation Sindoor on Wednesday.

When Hafiz Abdur Rauf, head of the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF), another proxy of the LeT, led funeral prayers for some of those killed in a strike on the group’s main complex at Muridke, he was joined by several senior Pakistan Army officers in uniform, Punjab Police inspector general Usman Anwar and senior bureaucrats of Pakistan’s most populous province.

The dead were buried with “state honours”, with their coffins draped in Pakistan’s flag, according to photos and videos that emerged of the funeral.

Rauf and the FIF were sanctioned by the US treasury department in 2010 in connection with the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. The LeT created FIF to fundraise and evade international pressure on the Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD) after the carnage perpetrated in India’s financial hub by a 10-member LeT team. “Few individuals are more integral to LeT’s fundraising than Hafiz Abdur Rauf”, the US treasury department said at the time of his listing.

The TRF emerged shortly after the Indian government scrapped Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in August 2019 and has since claimed several attacks, mainly in urban areas of the union territory. It has targeted Kashmiri Pandits and claimed responsibility for an attack on a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims in Reasi area of Jammu that killed nine people in June 2024.

Ajai Sahni, executive director of the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which closely tracks Pakistan-based terror groups, said the listing of groups such as the TRF provides notional legitimacy for international efforts against such orgnaisations. “When the parent organisations are under sanctions, these new groups are free to act,” he said.

The TRF, Sahni noted, has a history of claiming terror attacks and backtracking, and has also been involved in issuing “moral edicts” aimed at different sections of society. “At the same time, its nomenclature is mean to give the group some sort of secular character and a contemporary ideology that distances it from the LeT,” he said.