WASHINGTON — The United States on Tuesday declared Pakistani Taliban leader Mullah Fazlullah a “global terrorist,” making it a crime to engage in transactions with the man behind the Dec. 16 attack in which 134 children at a Peshawar school were killed.
The State Department said in a statement the formal designation also allows the U.S. government to seize any of his property or interests in the United States, including those under the control of U.S. citizens.
Fazlullah and the Taliban claimed responsibility for the school attack that resulted in the deaths of “at least 148 individuals, mostly students,” the department said.
Fazlullah also was behind the 2012 assassination attempt on Pakistani schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai, who last year was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Fazlullah was elected leader of the Taliban in 2013.
The Pakistani Taliban was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in 2010.
Kerry visits school
On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry visited the school in northwest Pakistan where Taliban militants murdered 134 of their classmates.
“This is a message that we’re not scared,” Noorin Sana, a former teacher at the army-run school, whose youngest son was killed in the Dec. 16 massacre, said by phone. “Here is another battalion standing against terrorists.”
Parents, teachers and students cried as they revisited the site of the horror in Peshawar. Army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif joined them at an assembly on the school’s grounds to recite verses from the Koran and sing the national anthem.
Kerry emphasized the need to go after all militant groups operating from Pakistan, including those that target Afghanistan and nuclear-armed neighbor India, according to a State Department official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
The secretary of state announced $250 million in aid for Pakistan to help stabilize tribal regions that border Afghanistan, where many of these groups hide. The U.S. will use the money to work with Pakistan in providing emergency food, aid, shelter, health care, education and livestock support for about 700,000 people who have been displaced from the region.
The U.S. sees an opportunity in the relatively new leadership across the region, the official said, with Prime Minster Nahendra Modi in India, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani, and Pakistan’s Sharif all creating an opening to work on reconciliation.
The official described the meeting as constructive and the first true interagency conversation at high levels in several years.
Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan have been marked by tension over American drone strikes and disputes about whether Pakistan is doing enough to combat terrorist groups that operate in the country and across the border in Afghanistan.
Pakistan and the U.S. collaborated in the 1980s to fund militant groups that fought to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Pakistan has received billions of dollars in U.S. aid while providing supply lines for its invasion of Afghanistan.