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Recently, India's statement on Pakistan said:

No other country can boast having 126 UN-designated terrorists and 27 UN-designated terrorist entities

Is this correct?
Is there a list of which country has how many (UN-designated) terrorists / terrorist entities?

I'm aware of the Global Terrorism Index but it serves a different purpose.

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    "Harbouring" implies that the government is content to have the person/entity residing in its borders. Pakistan definitely has a lot of terrorists around the government is actively fighting, so I would expect that the number of terrorists present in Pakistan significantly exceeds the number of terrorists harboured by Pakistan, for any reasonable definition of terrorist.
    – Arno
    Commented Dec 17, 2022 at 4:26
  • Are you talking about the United Nations Security Council resolution 1267 and the UNSC subcommittee? That process was focussed on Afghanistan, so it is little problem that e.g. South American countries are not on the list ...
    – o.m.
    Commented Dec 17, 2022 at 6:49
  • @o.m. I'm concerned with the overall list of UN-designated terrorists and entities, not just related to a specific resolution, assuming there is such a list(?)
    – whoisit
    Commented Dec 17, 2022 at 7:53
  • @Arno edited the question to that effect. I'm just interested in how many terrorists and entities work from within which countries. If the country is harbouring them would be speculative.
    – whoisit
    Commented Dec 17, 2022 at 7:55
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    @whoisit, the only "list" that the UN keeps is the one specified by 1267. It is a list of al-Qaeda and ISIL/daesh type organisations. un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1267/aq_sanctions_list/… There isn't a UN list of all terrorist organisations, and this one is going to be based towards Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan. So, this is a typical political statement. Not actually false, but not the whole truth either.
    – James K
    Commented Dec 17, 2022 at 10:14

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This is probably correct, but not the whole truth.

The UN doesn't maintain a general list of terrorist groups - this would be tricky in parts of the world in which terrorist groups can become governments - Think ANC or the Sandinistas (or the Contras). There are lots of "revolutionary governments", and they may have once been considered a terrorist group. (And I might mention the RSS in India too)

However there is a resolution, 1267, that authorises the use of sanctions against Al Qaeda and related organisations (later widened to include ISIL/daesh). To this end, the UN keeps a list of these organisations, and it is to this that it seems the minister was referring.

Now as this list is a list of Al Qaeda type organistions, it is disproportionally biased towards Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria.

There is a valid point here, Pakistan does have a lot of Islamic terrorist groups It is probably true to say that there are 27 Al Qaeda inspired groups based in Pakistan. But the minister is not speaking the whole truth here, as the UN list does not include many groups that are not aligned with Al Qaeda. For example, Indian groups such as the ULFA (Assam independence) or Bajrang Dal (Hindu ultranationalist) are not on the list, so a literal count is misleading.

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