In yet another blatant disregard for the rights and well-being of Baloch students, the Frontier Corps (FC), a paramilitary force controlled by the Pakistan Army, has established a camp within the premises of a Girls’ College in Kharan district, Pak-occupied-Balochistan. This move has triggered widespread protests from students, who took to the college grounds to voice their outrage.
The protesting students condemned the construction of the military camp inside the educational institution, calling it a gross violation of their right to education and personal safety. Chanting slogans against the occupation of their college by military forces, they expressed deep frustration over the continuous militarization of civilian spaces in POB.
“This camp has severely disrupted our academic life,” said one of the protester. “Our studies are being gravely affected, and the presence of armed personnel within a women’s educational institution violates our traditions and privacy,” she added.
According to the latest report from the Balochistan Department of Education, the number of closed schools has surged to 3,694 across 35 districts as of September 2, up from 3,152 in May. The Paki establishment is continuously attempting to limit educational opportunities for the Baloch community, not only to keep them marginalized but also to suppress the spread of pro-independence sentiments.
Recently, Pak forces encircled Turbat University and launched a search operation in the women’s hostel, targeting students in their pursuit of information on Mahil Baloch, a fidayeen fighter involved in BLA’s Operation Herof, which resulted in significant casualties for the Pakistan Army.
This is the reason for the increased militarization and the presence of Pak Army forces in girls’ schools and universities, aiming to monitor and limit the rise of nationalist sentiments. However, these actions violate international human rights norms, educational institutions should be safe havens for students, not military outposts.
The President of the Insaaf Students Federation (ISF) Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Ishfaq, has issued a strong call to action, urging students and youth across the province to prepare for mass demonstrations in response to the mysterious disappearance of Ali Amin Gandapur, the Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This rallying cry comes at a time of heightened unrest, as the Punjabi Pak Army orchestrated Gandapur’s abduction to silence political opposition and suppress dissent.
Gandapur’s disappearance comes shortly after his remarks at a rally in support of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan. During the rally, Gandapur boldly threatened Pak Army to forcibly free Imran from jail, which is a direct challenge to the Paki establishment. Following these remarks, Gandapur was abducted.
On Monday, reports emerged of the arrests of PTI Chairman Gohar Ali Khan, outspoken leader Sher Afzal Marwat, Waziristan MNA Zubair Khan, and lawyer Shoaib Shaheen.
Gohar and Marwat were taken into custody separately outside Parliament House, where a large contingent of personnel swiftly bundled them into vehicles as they exited the assembly building after Monday’s session.
Shaheen was apprehended in a surprise raid at his office in G-9, as captured in footage of the arrest. His staff attempted to resist, but they were also detained by nearly a dozen police officers and plainclothesmen.
The Punjabi Pak Army’s heavy-handed tactics, including the arrest of political figures, violent suppression of opposition, and ruthless crackdown on PTI leaders, are part of the Pak Army’s strategy to quash any resistance to its authority. The region is under decades of violence, exploitation, and suppression, with little to no accountability for the actions of the Pak military.
The Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) terrorists recently blocked the burial of an Ahmadi in Kamiliya, Pakistan. This incident is yet another grim reminder of the unchecked persecution Ahmadis face, not only in life but even after death.
It hasn’t even been a week since a lawyer was threatened to renounce his Ahmadi faith or risk the end of his career, underlining the systematic oppression that reaches all corners of society. The violent assaults on Ahmadi Muslim mosques are just one aspect of this persecution. Even more chilling is the Paki establishment’s sanctioned desecration of their graves, an act that strips the dead of their dignity and delivers a brutal message to the living.
In January 2024, Punjab police desecrated 65 tombstones in Musay Wala. The Paki establishment has created an environment where every religious minorities, are denied even the basic right to rest in peace.
The Paki military establishment has reinforced the power of terrorist groups like TLP, who act with impunity. From the destruction of their mosques to the desecration of their graves, their faith, history, and existence are systematically erased.
Since the constitutional amendments of 1985, Ahmadis have been stripped of their basic democratic right to vote. This policy enforced by the Pak Army and its political apparatus, effectively renders them second-class citizens, voiceless and marginalized.
In an unprecedented move, police personnel in Lakki Marwat district, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, have taken to the streets in protest, shutting down the Indus Highway to voice their anger over the growing wave of targeted killings in the region. The demonstrators, comprised of frustrated police officers, are demanding that the police force be empowered to counter these attacks, while calling for the removal of secret agencies from the control room.
Chanting slogans like “We are being fueled by a dollar war,” protestors expressed their frustration over the deliberate manipulation by the occupied state, the Paki establishment of exploiting the Pashtun regions for financial gain. The rise of militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is part of a calculated strategy to attract funding from the United States, under the guise of fighting terrorism.
These so-called terror attacks are engineered by the Punjabi Pak Army whenever it faces budget shortages or when the economy slows down. They impose fake terrorism on Pashtun soil to portray themselves as victims of terror. This way, the Punjabi-Pak Army draws money in the form of international aid, claiming they are fighting the war on terrorism.
However, it is the Pashtuns who bear the brunt of this “war,” facing atrocities such as targeted killings, fake encounters, and forced disappearances. While the Army fills its coffers, Pashtuns are left to suffer.
This protest marks a significant development in the ongoing unrest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as the police personnel—who are often seen as foot soldiers in the occupied-state’s so-called counterterrorism efforts—have openly rebelled against the military’s manipulation and exploitation of the region.
A dangerous and extremist mindset continues to haunt religious minorities, as members of a Germany-based Pakistani radical Islamist group, led by Hassan Gondal, have been actively targeting Sikh girls for conversion. This disturbing trend mirrors the oppressive tactics seen in Pakistan, where religious minorities, including Sikhs, have long faced persecution at the hands of Islamist extremists.
Hassan Gondal Dogar, a Pakistani-origin TikTok user based in Berlin, has gained notoriety for his inflammatory rhetoric against Sikhism and its revered leaders. His online activity is not just isolated hate speech—it reflects the broader, deeply ingrained extremist agenda within segments of radical Pakistani society. The targeting of Sikhs for conversion is part of a longstanding pattern of oppression that has its roots in the bloody partition of India in 1947.
The biggest silence on #GroomingGangs in UK was not that it was almost exclusively done by #Pakistani men or that it going on for decades. But that #Sikh girls were its first targets! Local Islamic groups paid 10x the white-girl reward for a successful KAUR to KHAN conversion. https://t.co/XqNVRKAjeSpic.twitter.com/Yz4SC1IcXK
The Sikh community has endured brutal violence at the hands of Muslim radicals since the 1947 partition, when around 7,000 Sikhs were massacred by the Muslim League, and an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 women were kidnapped and raped during the Rawalpindi massacres. Since then, the Sikh population in Pakistan has dwindled from around 40,000 in 2002 to less than 8,000 today. Those who remain live under the constant shadow of persecution, their sacred gurdwaras neglected and left to decay, if not vandalized.
Alarmingly, the online attacks by extremists like Gondal echo a more widespread issue: the forced conversion of Sikh girls, known as ‘Kaur to Khan’ conversions. While officially denied by many, reports from various parts of the world, particularly the UK, suggest that this troubling practice is more common than acknowledged.
It was in the late seventies that CIA finalised its covert plan for waging proxy war against the then Soviet army in Afghanistan by using radicalised Islamic fighters [mujahideen]. Codenamed Operation Cyclone, this devious enterprise came as a windfall for Pakistan’s military dictator-turned-resident Gen Zia ul Haq as it led to a Faustian US-Pakistan bargain [or to put it more precisely, an unholy agreement between CIA and Pakistan Army’s spy agency Inter Services Intelligence or ISI].
Operation Cyclone was a classic example of proxy war. While ISI was required to provide radicalised and trained manpower to fight the occupational Soviet army in Afghanistan, Washington would divert requisite military hardware to arm the fighters as well finances to sustain this venture through CIA. Since ISI physically distributed weapons, military equipment and funds received from CIA to mujahideen groups, substantial diversion of US weapons and money for Pakistan’s proxy war in J&K as well as for lining the pockets of Generals was no big deal for Rawalpindi.
‘Poisoning’ Pakistani Society
The gains made by Pakistan in terms of extremely generous US military and financial aid packages were indeed enormous. In fact the lure for lucre was so compelling that Pakistan Army’s leadership conveniently chose to disregard the inevitable negative consequences that its deeply flawed decision to host religiously indoctrinated Islamic fundamentalists on its soil portended for the hapless people of Pakistan. The saddest part is not Rawalpindi’s continuing state of denial but the pride with which Pakistan Army Generals recall this abhorrent bargain that has claimed thousands of innocent lives.
During his 2010 interview given to Spiegel, Pakistan’s ex President and former Army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf nonchalantly admitted that “We [Pakistan Army] poisoned Pakistani civil society for 10 years when we fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.” He went on to boast that “It was jihad, and we brought in militants from all over the world, with the West and Pakistan together in the lead role.” This revelation was neither an emotional outburst nor an unintended or accidental utterance.
In 2019, Pakistani politician Farhatullah Babar shared an undated interview clip in which Gen Musharraf can clearly be heard saying that “…In 1979, we had introduced religious militancy in Afghanistan to benefit Pakistan and to push [the] Soviet out of the country. We brought Mujahideen from all over the world, we trained them, supplied weapons. They were our heroes.” Not only this, he even admitted that “Haqqani was our hero. Osama bin Laden was our hero.” [Emphasis added].
What Musharraf euphemistically referred to as “religious militancy” actually preached intolerance, sanctified violence against innocents by brazenly misquoting/distorting Islamic teachings. However, thanks to its effective propagation in madrassas [Islamic seminaries], this fundamentalist interpretation found widespread traction amongst talibs [students] in an impressionable age. Religious extremism thus took root within Pakistani society and spread like wildfire and several terrorist groups espousing such repugnant ideology mushroomed.
One such fanatical terrorist group is Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan [TTP] which shares Afghan Taliban’s skewed interpretation of Islam and wants to enforce it in Pakistan and therein lies the paradox- while Islamabad unconditionally endorses the regressive brand of Islam imposed by Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan, it doesn’t want TTP to do likewise in Pakistan. However, many locals in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province [which was a major religious indoctrination center since the late seventies] approve of TTP’s aim to establish sharia [Islamic religious laws] in Pakistan.
Rawalpindi’s Ambivalent Anti-Terrorism Policy
The Pakistan Army makes it a point to repeatedly announce its zero-tolerance for terrorism and keeps reminding the world that it has made the maximum sacrifices in its war against terrorism. While the Pakistan Army has definitely suffered inordinately high casualties due to terrorist violence, this doesn’t prove that its famous “We are going after terrorists of all hue and colour” claim made in 2014 during Operation Zarb-e-Azb anti-terrorist campaign in North Waziristan.
While the Pakistan Army claimed to have killed more than 3,500 terrorists, surprisingly not even a single terrorist belonging to the Haqqani network was either killed or captured. That BBC South Asia correspondent Andrew North’s news report was aptly captioned “All hues or some shades in North Waziristan” and mentioned that “… many reports, as well as footage obtained by the BBC, suggest some militants at least got away and some shades of “terrorist” may still be safe.” [Emphasis added].
Rather than taking the menace of terrorism by its horns, Rawalpindi has been brokering peace agreements with various terrorist groups like the Shakai agreement [2004], Sararogha Peace Agreement [2005], Waziristan Accord [2006] and Swat Agreement [2008]. The Pakistan Army has also facilitated several unwritten peace deals; some such agreements include those with terrorist leaders Hafiz Gul Bahadur [North Waziristan], Faqir Muhammad [Bajaur Agency] and Lashkar-i-Islami [Khyber Agency].
The fact that despite making several concessions to terrorist groups, none of these agreements endured just goes to prove that terrorists can never be trusted. However, despite being repeatedly backstabbed, Rawalpindi continued to appease TTP and in its desperate bid to make peace with this terrorist group [which was responsible for killing 134 school children in the gruesome 2014 Army School Peshawar massacre], even unconditionally released more than a 100 TTP fighters in its custody convicted for killing Pakistan Army soldiers as well as civilians.
Prognosis
Pakistan Army chief Gen Syed Asim Munir has been waxing eloquent on Rawalpindi’s zero tolerance towards terrorism and promising to slay this dragon- just like his predecessors did. And faithfully following the footsteps of previous Army chiefs, he too is busy blaming all and sundry for the sorry state of affairs instead of taking timely and resolute action to tackle this scourge.
So as far as Pakistan Army’s war on terror is concerned, Gen Munir has little to boast about other than attempting to discredit TTP by challenging its Islamic credentials and referring to it as Fitna al-Khawarij [the first religious-political breakaway group in the history of Islam]. He has also provided quasi-legitimacy to suppression to freedom of expression by coining the phrase “digital terrorism” to encompass actions that aim to create a gulf between state institutions and the people of Pakistan- a master stroke to muzzle growing public criticism of Pakistan Army’s continuing meddling in political affairs and judicial matters.
Till now, both Islamabad and Rawalpindi have been primarily accusing foreign powers for fuelling terrorism in Pakistan. However, Gen Munir has taken his ‘digital terrorism’ argument to a different level by classifying inimical forces working acting against national interests into “malicious actors, subversive proxies, and the facilitators of Pakistan’s external and internal adversaries” changing the existing outlook on this issue and preventing constructive criticism of institutions by equating the same with treason!
It’s therefore most likely that Rawalpindi will continue with its reactive anti-terrorism strategy based on indiscriminate use of brute force and terrorising people through enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. That such an inhuman approach will only further aggravate the already precarious situation in Pakistan is obvious, but Rawalpindi doesn’t need to worry because l the blame can conveniently be apportioned on ‘digital terrorists’ and “malicious actors, subversive proxies, and the facilitators of Pakistan’s external and internal adversaries.”
Tailpiece: Despite Rawalpindi’s bombastic rhetoric aimed at diverting public attention from reality, it’s abundantly clear that the people of Pakistan are suffering [and will unfortunately continue to do so], only because the Pakistan Army failed to eschew its puerile ‘good Taliban’ philosophy.
But Rawalpindi can’t complain that it wasn’t warned- in 2011, didn’t the then US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton during her Pakistan visit remind Pakistan Army Generals that “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors… eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard”?
A nomadic woman and her daughters blocked a road in North Waziristan to protest the arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance of three male members of her family. The protest highlights the growing frustration and despair among the Pashtun community in Pakistan’s former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where such incidents have become a daily reality.
The Pashtun regions, particularly North and South Waziristan, have long been subjected to the oppressive policies of the Punjabi-Pakistan Army, which continues to wield unchecked power in these areas. Enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and brutal crackdowns on civilians have become a routine practice, leaving the local population in a state of perpetual fear.
This latest incident serves as a grim reminder of the plight of the Pashtun people, whose voices are continuously silenced under the oppressive policies of Pakistan’s military establishment. The region has witnessed decades of violence, exploitation, and suppression, with little to no accountability for the actions of the military.
Thousands of supporters of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, gathered in Islamabad on Sunday, defying authorities’ attempts to block access to the capital. The demonstration, organized by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, marks one of the largest protests since the ex-cricketer was jailed in 2023 on multiple charges, many of which remain under legal scrutiny.
Protesters bypassed barriers, including shipping containers placed by the authorities to block major roads into the capital. “Despite their efforts to shut down the city, thousands have turned up. They cannot suppress the people’s determination,” said PTI Senator Humayun Mohmand.
Imran Khan, imprisoned since August 2023, has maintained that the charges against him are politically motivated, aimed at preventing his return to power. After rising to prominence in 2018 by campaigning against corruption, Khan was ousted in 2022 following a fallout with the military, which holds significant power in Pakistan’s political landscape. His removal has fueled frustration among Pakistanis who oppose military involvement in civilian politics.
Sunday’s demonstration, though largely peaceful, saw clashes between police and PTI activists. Khan’s arrest in 2023 on corruption charges led to widespread protests and a harsh crackdown by the Pak Army.
At least eight Afghan Taliban soldiers, including two key commanders, have been killed in the recent exchange of mortar fire in the Shorko area of Kurram, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where at least five Pak security personnel and seven Afghan Taliban were injured. The exchange over the weekend, also injured 16 Afghan Taliban soldiers. This incident is just one in a series of violent confrontations that reflect the deep-seated issues plaguing the two nations.
The Kurram-Khost border area has recently witnessed repeated clashes between Pak forces and Afghan Talibans, much of which stems from Pakistan’s own destabilizing policies in Afghanistan. Terrorists like the TTP, which Pakistan’s military leadership once supported, have now turned on their creators.
Islamabad’s attempt to stem the rise of the TTP has been a patchwork of inconsistent policies—ranging from negotiations to military operations, border fencing, and mass expulsions of Afghan refugees. While the Paki establishment accuses the Afghan Taliban of sheltering TTP terrorists, the root cause of these issues can be traced back to Pakistan’s own duplicity. The very extremists it once armed and supported to wage proxy wars are now threatening its own stability.
The erection of a border fence and the mass expulsion of Afghan refugees—over 500,000 last October, with plans to deport another 800,000—are desperate attempts by Pakistan to control the blowback of its failed policies.
Despite these efforts, the TTP continues to launch cross-border attacks, exposing the futility of Islamabad’s military-centric approach. By weaponizing extremist factions, Rawalpindi has lost control of the monster it created.
The Pakistan Army has intensified its aggressive operations in the Bolan and Mastung regions of Pak-occupied Balochistan. Reportedly, military helicopters are continuously patrolling the skies, while ground forces face growing resistance from the local population.
The Army, notorious for its brutal tactics in POB, has been conducting large-scale operations in the Machh area of Bolan and its surrounding regions. There’s presence of at least six military helicopters, further escalating tensions in the already volatile region. Alongside these aerial maneuvers, a significant movement of troops on the ground has been observed, raising fears of further oppression and violence against the Baloch people, who have long been subjected to systemic exploitation and human rights abuses by the military.
In the neighboring region of Mastung, helicopter flights are also ongoing in the Spilinji area. In a sign of rising resistance to the Pak Army’s unchecked power, reports suggest that ground forces have been targeted in a bomb explosion, though officials have not provided any details.
This surge in military activity reflects the Pakistan Army’s relentless campaign to suppress dissent in POB, where it has a long-standing history of committing human rights violations, including enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and the exploitation of local resources for the benefit of the Punjab’s elite. Despite the Army’s attempts to quash the resistance, the continued unrest suggests that the people of POB are no longer willing to remain silent in the face of oppression.
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