Tariq Ahmed never lets his pistol out of his sight these days. Sitting cross-legged on a woven charpai, his face concealed with a scarf, the 26-year-old looks nervously left and right, shifting his gun in and out of his waistband.
It was here, just a few months ago in this neighbourhood bordering Pakistan’s north-western border city of Peshawar that his uncle Shehan Shah, 36, was shot dead at point-blank range by the Taliban.
Like Ahmed, his uncle was also in the police, a higher-ranking constable dedicated to his job, which supported his family of seven children. But as Shah stepped out one early Saturday morning in June, to make his way on foot to Hashtnagri police station, he was followed by masked men on a motorbike. As one drew out an AK-47 rifle, Shah spotted him and tried to wrestle it away but the accomplice raised a pistol and riddled Shah with bullets.
The attackers were never caught but it did not take long for the Pakistan Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), to take credit for Shah’s killing, accusing him of being part of anti-Taliban operations. “Pakistani Taliban are present in every village around here now,” said Ahmed. “It seems they have a network of spies or informants who can tell them about local police who take part in raids on their camps.”
Two of Ahmed’s fellow officers from his police unit in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were also recently blown up in a targeted suicide bombing by TTP. Now he lives in a permanent state of fear. “These terror attacks on police are increasing,” said Ahmed. “We are very vigilant. We cannot go anywhere unnecessary, and I don’t tell anyone when I go out.”
The deadly TTP attacks are just some of thousands that have been taking place across the region that borders Afghanistan, driving a destabilising surge in Taliban militancy, which has swiftly become one of the greatest national security threats facing Pakistan.
On Saturday, deadly clashes erupted along the Pakistan-Afghan border after Islamabad was accused of carrying out airstrikes on Afghan soil, including the capital, Kabul, in what was believed to be an attempt to target the TTP leadership and camps.
The TTP emerged in Pakistan’s tribal-dominated border areas around 2007, amid the US-led “war on terror”. Ideologically aligned to the Afghan Taliban but a separate entity, the group eventually grew to about 30,000 militants, who occupied and controlled swathes of territory in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. After a long and brutal counter-insurgency operation, backed by the US, by 2015 Pakistan’s military had declared a “phenomenal success” in eradicating TTP militants from the mountainous border area.
Yet over the past four years – in direct correlation with the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan – attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have once again been dramatically on the rise, leading many to fear a return to the horrors of the TTP heyday in the late 2000s.
According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (Acled), so far this year there have been more than 600 attacks by the TTP, the worst in a decade. Thousands of police, paramilitary and military personnel – many targeted while they are off duty – as well as a growing number of civilians have been killed, as part of the TTP’s attempt to destabilise the region. Over the past three months alone, the Center for Research and Security Studies in Pakistan reported a 75% rise in militant violence.
In September, the TTP claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on an army truck that killed nine soldiers, two separate attacks on the 13 September that killed 19 soldiers, the storming of the federal constabulary headquarters in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that left six officers dead, and a car bomb outside a paramilitary headquarters in the region of Balochistan that killed 10 people, many of them civilians.
In areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the TTP have established a significant presence, setting up checkpoints and roadblocks. Militants walk openly in residential areas, where they take food from local people and are accused of extorting and holding businesses to ransom.
“It is an environment of terror here and we are living in fear,” said a mine owner from the Mohmand district in Khyber Pakthunkwa, who was forced to close down his mine last month after Taliban militants demanded he hand over money he could not afford.
Nisar Ali, a local political leader and resident of North Waziristan, one of the centres of the insurgency, said the “militants roam freely. They ride bikes and rickshaws without any fear, not far from the military camps. We see them roaming around all night and day. It’s only the movement of the security forces, not the militants, that is restricted.”
A full-blown military counter-insurgency has begun in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in September the military carried out an airstrike on an alleged TTP camp. However, local people claimed dozens of civilians, including children, were among the dead. For many, the strike evoked traumatic memories of the years of US-led drone strikes, mass displacement and casualties amid the “war on terror” and the previous TTP crackdown.
“Drones, target killings, curfews, the militants roaming in North Waziristan is the new normal,” said Ali. “We see drones flying above our heads but most of the time they kill women, children and the elderly, even our livestock, but not the militants.”
The Pakistan government has laid the blame for the resurgence solely at the feet of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, accusing them of giving the group a safe haven. A UN report last year accused the Taliban fighters of joining the TTP and the Taliban regime of giving regular aid packages to TTP fighters and a monthly financial stipend for its leader, Noor Wali Mehsud.
“The rise in TTP attacks coincides almost perfectly with the Taliban coming to power,” said Pearl Pandya, a senior analyst for Acled. “They’ve turned a blind eye to the new TTP training camps and they released hundreds of TTP militants from prisons, many of whom have found their way back into Pakistan.
“In the face of any Pakistan military operations, TTP militants escape to their safe haven over the border, and then just as easily come back.”
Nonetheless, she also emphasised that Pakistan’s own fragmented political landscape played a role. The imprisonment of the popular former prime minister Imran Khan, who is from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, had led to a widespread loss of trust in the state in the region, that was now being exploited by the TTP to gain support and fuel recruitment. “People here fear the central government and military as much as they fear the Taliban,” said one local person in Mohmand.
The Afghan Taliban denies any involvement with the TTP. “There are no safe havens of TTP in Afghanistan,” said the Afghan Taliban foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi.
Muhammad Ali Saif, an adviser to the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said that this time round, the TTP militants were much more technologically well-equipped – using equipment left behind by US troops when they withdrew from Afghanistan such as night-vision goggles and sniper weapons – and had carried out numerous operations using quadcopters and other drones.
“The technology and sophisticated weapons available to the militants has changed everything,” said Saif. “The difficulty is that they are living among the population and move in scattered groups at night. They don’t have big bases in Pakistan. Their bases are in Afghanistan.”
Saif was among those opposing large-scale military operations, such as airstrikes, to crush the insurgency, saying that history had proved they only fuelled mistrust of the state and sympathy for militants. Instead he advocated for better dialogue with the Afghan Taliban – efforts he says have been blocked by the central government.
While the TTP resurgence has remained mostly concentrated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Saif warned that if they continued to mobilise, Taliban militants could push into other regions, as was seen a decade ago. “If this bad faith persists, and this fight spreads to other provinces such as Punjab and Sindh, it will be catastrophic,” he said. “We might see the Pakistani Taliban getting deadlier.”
