From Jihad to Jirga: How the TTP Is Rebranding Itself as Defender of the Pashtun Nation

In the first half of 2025, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed more than a thousand attacks, with over 300 attacks in July alone, as it intensified operations across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southern Punjab, Pakistan. Yet beyond the rising body count, a more subtle evolution is underway. Once defined as a religious militant organization fighting to impose Islamic law or Shariah, the TTP now frames its struggle as a broader political and ethnic battle against the Pakistani state, deploying a coordinated a propaganda campaign to position itself as the guardian of the Pashtun nation, invoking tribal honor, civilian suffering, and ethnic identity.

The Narrative Shift: From Religious Vanguard to Tribal Guardian

The TTP emerged in 2007 from a coalition of militant factions in Pakistan’s tribal areas, combining a hardline Deobandi ideology with alliances to al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban. It rapidly became one of Pakistan’s most lethal insurgent groups. Framing its campaign as defensive jihad, the TTP embedded Islamist goals at the core of its insurgency, carrying out attacks against security forces, civilians, and minorities.

From 2014, however, sustained Pakistani military operations, U.S. drone strikes, and internal divisions severely weakened the group, reducing its attacks to a historic low by 2018. Beginning in  2019, signs of the TTP’s revival began to emerge through an increased attack tempo, merger announcements with other militant factions, and intensified propaganda. This slow revival accelerated into a violent resurgence post-2021, enabled by a more regionally permissive environment linked to the Afghan Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan.

Historically, the TTP’s propaganda leaned heavily into religious justifications of its goals and operations, with the group’s founding charter in 2007 explicitly stating three central missions: enforcement of Shariah, establishing a unified front against U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, and conducting defensive jihad against Pakistani security forces. This religious militancy manifested in concrete actions, such as a 29-page fatwa issued against Pakistani media in 2014.

Recently, the group’s ideological playbook has shifted. Religion remains central, but the TTP has increasingly woven ethnic identity and localized grievances into its messaging, an adaptation seemingly designed to exploit societal discontent and sustain its relevance amid shifting conflict dynamics.

Generally, religious fundamentalism aims to create a faith-based community that transcends ethnic or territorial divisions, while ethnonationalism seeks to defend the political and material interests of a specific ethnic group rooted in notions of common blood and territory. Though often seen as incompatible, the two can hybridize into powerful ideological frameworks, as demonstrated by the Afghan Taliban’s fusion of fundamentalist Islam with Pashtun ethnonationalism. The TTP’s current rebranding reflects a similar blending, as it layers Islamist goals onto narratives of Pashtun solidarity.