By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Security forces killed 13 militants in two operations in the restive northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa this week, the military said on Thursday, as the country presses ahead with a nationwide campaign to root out insurgents amid a surge in attacks.
The operations, carried out on Jan. 13 and 14 in the districts of Bannu and Kurram, targeted militants associated with what the military described as the “Indian Proxy Fitna-al-Khawarij,” a term used by authorities for the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella group of armed factions.
In Bannu, forces acting on intelligence reports of militant activity engaged the insurgents in an intense firefight, killing eight of them, according to a statement from the Inter-Services Public Relations, the military’s media wing. A separate raid in Kurram resulted in the deaths of five more militants during an exchange of fire.
“Sanitisation operations were being conducted to eliminate any other Indian-sponsored kharji found in the area,” the statement said, referring to the militants with a term drawn from Islamic history for an extremist sect that rebelled against authority and branded other Muslims as apostates. The actions are part of Pakistan’s broader counterterrorism drive under the “Azm-i-Istehkam” initiative, approved by a federal committee on the National Action Plan and launched in June 2024 to intensify efforts against militant groups. The military vowed that the “relentless counter-terrorism campaign” by security forces and law enforcement agencies “will continue at full pace to wipe out the menace of foreign sponsored and supported terrorism from the country.”
The killings come days after forces eliminated four militants in an intelligence-based operation in the Kalat district of southwestern Balochistan province, another area plagued by insurgency. Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in militant violence since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, with cross-border attacks hitting hardest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, the provinces that share a porous frontier with its neighbour. Despite aggressive operations that have claimed record numbers of insurgent lives, the country grappled with a 34 percent increase in terrorist attacks and a 21 percent rise in related fatalities in 2025 compared with the previous year, according to a report by the Islamabad-based Pak Institute for Peace Studies.
At a news conference last week, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations, detailed the scale of the response. Law enforcement agencies, including the army, police, federal constabulary and intelligence units, conducted 75,175 intelligence-based operations nationwide last year. Of those, 14,658 took place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 58,778 in Balochistan and 1,739 in other regions.
The general reported 5,397 terrorism incidents across the country in 2025, with 3,811 — or 71 percent — occurring in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 1,557 in Balochistan. At least 2,597 militants were killed in counterterrorism efforts, and highlighted 10 major attacks that deliberately targeted civilians and soft targets, with Afghan fighters involved in all of them. The persistent violence has strained Pakistan’s security apparatus and economy, fueling calls for stronger border controls and diplomatic pressure on Afghanistan to curb militant safe havens. Officials in Islamabad have repeatedly accused India of backing proxy groups to destabilise the region, though New Delhi has denied the claims.
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