Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan's shadow province threatens China BRI Projects

 ISLAMABAD: According to analysts, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan's (TTP) urge to control the country's south threatens to be a huge problem for restoring multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRO), reported Nikkei Asia.

The Pakistani Taliban, TTP, announced last week that they are building a 'shadow province' in the Southwestern province of Balochistan. The region is home to the BRI's port city of Gwadar and for two decades, it has been a field of low-level separatist insurgency, with Chinese interests targeted for attacks. TTP has been on a drive to establish its 'Kalat-Makran' province. For that, the banned outfit will try to build a parallel government in that region and cover over 40 percent of Balochistan's area, including a 760-km coastline, as per Nikkei Asia.

A month ago, TTP group attacked a production facility for natural gas and oil in Northwest Pakistan which killed half a dozen police and security guards. The banned group is popular for repeated attacks in the country but they do not formally rule any territory.

Last year, they established another shadow province in the North of Balochistan. Moreover, mostly Pashtuns, an ethnic group that accounts for the bulk of the TTP's members and senior leadership, occupy that region, according to Nikkei Asia.

Kiyya Baloch, an independent analyst who studies security issues and the region's cycle of violence said, "Beijing has made its new investment in Balochistan conditional with security guarantees, and the emerging threat from TTP will be a huge problem."

Gwadar Port is the centre of the Pakistani component of Beijing's globe-spanning BRI program USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The drive stalled under Pakistan's previous government. But Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who came to power last year, is moving to revive CPEC projects amid an economic crisis punctuated by soaring inflation and dwindling foreign exchange reserves.

A counterterrorism expert at Australia's Macquarie University, Khuram Iqbal, said, "The government "is making concerted efforts to revitalize CPEC as a means to revive the economy of Pakistan. The new shadow province of TTP will hurt these plans."

Abdul Basit, another research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore said that the new shadow province may be an attempt to mimic the Taliban's largely successful drive to run a parallel government in Afghanistan before it retook control of the country in 2021, as per Nikkei Asia. (ANI)

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