Last week, in a dramatic display of strength, about 150 Taliban militants armed with automatic weapons, hand grenades and rockets stormed a prison in Bannu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. It was the start of the spring offensive. The subsequent escape of about 400 prisoners points to the growing strength and rapid reorganisation of Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked militants in the lawless border areas.
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility, and a TTP commander later claimed that about 150 prisoners reached Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, while local authorities claimed to have recaptured 34. The escaped militants include Adnan Rasheed, the mastermind of an assassination attempt on former president Pervez Musharraf, who will rejoin the TTP and enhance its operational capacity.
Formed in 2007, the TTP has a close association with the Afghan Taliban. The hard-core militants who escaped from Bannu jail could be instrumental in launching the Taliban’s spring initiative in Afghanistan; the same day as the jailbreak, heavily armed Taliban attacked the diplomatic enclave in Kabul and tried to storm parliament in a rare coordinated attack spanning cities across eastern Afghanistan.
