The Resistance Front (TRF), a Lashkar-e-Toiba proxy that allegedly carried out the Pahalgam terror attack, has been named in a half-yearly report of the UN Security Council published on Tuesday.
The report by the UNSC’s 1267 Sanctions Monitoring Team Concerning ISIL (Da’esh), Al-Qaeda and Associated Individuals and Entities, takes into account the Pahalgam strike and names the TRF in this context.
Referring to the April 22 carnage, the report states: “The Resistance Front (TRF), which in parallel published a photograph of the attack site. The claim of responsibility was repeated the following day. On 26 April, however, TRF retracted its claim.
“There was no further communication from TRF, and no other group claimed responsibility. Regional relations remain fragile. There is a risk that terrorist groups may exploit these regional tensions. One Member State said the attack could not have happened without Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) support, and that there was a relationship between LeT and TRF. Another Member State said that the attack was carried out by TRF, which was synonymous with LeT. One Member State rejected these views and said that LeT was defunct.”
Since this is the first time the TRF — functional since 2019 — has been named in any UN document, India claimed to have scored a diplomatic victory.
Officials claimed that Pakistan’s strategy of plausible deniability — using secular and modern names such as “The Resistance Front” and “People Against Fascist Front” for its jihadi proxies to divert attention from LeT/JeM and give an indigenous appearance to its terrorist activities in Jammu and Kashmir — now stands punctured.
Even before the Pahalgam attack, India had been trying to flag the TRF to the UNSC’s 1267 sanctions committee. This was disclosed by foreign secretary Vikram Misri on May 7 in his statement on the launch of Operation Sindoor. Underscoring New Delhi’s efforts in this direction, he said: “It is notable that India had given inputs about the TRF in the half-yearly report to the monitoring team of the UN’s 1267 sanctions committee in May and November 2024, bringing out its role as a cover for Pakistan-based terrorist groups.”
In December 2023, India had informed the monitoring team about the LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammad operating through small terror groups such as the TRF.