Pakistani Taliban Warns Journalists Against Calling Them “Terrorists”

Peshawar:

The banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has warned the nation’s media and journalists in opposition to calling them a “terrorist outfit” or they are going to be handled as “enemies”.

TTP spokesman Mohammad Khurasani, in a press release on social media on Monday, mentioned his organisation was monitoring media protection which branded the TTP with epithets similar to “terrorists and extremists”.

“Utilizing such phrases for TTP confirmed a partisan position of media and journalists,” the Daybreak newspaper quoted the net assertion by the TTP.

“Such labels on the TTP meant the media professionals had been dishonest in the direction of their obligation and would create enemies for itself,” Mohammad Khurasani mentioned.

Subsequently, the media ought to name them by the title of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, he mentioned.

The Pakistani Taliban was fashioned in 2007 and the federal government listed it as a proscribed organisation in August 2008, following focused assaults on civilians.

The TTP’s first chief, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in a drone strike in 2009 by the US.

In its Nationwide Motion Plan in 2014, the Pakistan authorities banned offshoot teams of the TTP and stopped the media from its so-called “glorification of militants”.

A number of Pakistani journalists have been killed and kidnapped, sandwiched between the militants and the federal government’s battle on terror.

At the least 30 newspersons have been killed in erstwhile Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province within the final decade. Inmost circumstances, the perpetrators haven’t been booked.