By Staff Reporter
PESHAWAR: Fifteen people, among them 12 soldiers, two police officers and a forestry official, were killed after militants stormed a joint security checkpost in northwestern Pakistan overnight, in an assault that has again exposed the scale of the militant threat facing the country’s western border regions.
The attack struck the checkpost in Tank district, part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in the early hours of Friday. According to the Pakistani military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), gunmen first attempted to force their way into the compound before detonating a vehicle packed with explosives against its perimeter wall, an assault the military said left the facility’s infrastructure “seriously damaged”.
ISPR said troops stationed at the post responded with “unwavering courage and professional excellence”, engaging the attackers as they tried to flee and killing 12 of them during the exchange. It was the vehicle bomb that followed, however, that inflicted the bulk of the casualties, killing 12 military personnel, two policemen and an official from the forest department.
The military attributed the attack to Fitna-al-Khawarij, the term it now uses in official communications to refer to the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and which it has increasingly paired with claims of Indian sponsorship. Islamabad has long accused New Delhi of backing militant groups operating against the Pakistani state, along with the Afghan Taliban government, which Pakistan also accuses of allowing militants sanctuary on its soil.
In its statement, ISPR said a “sanitisation operation” had been launched in the area to hunt down any remaining attackers, and reaffirmed that counterterrorism operations under the government’s Azm-i-Istehkam campaign, sanctioned by the Federal Apex Committee on the National Action Plan, would continue “at full pace” against what it called foreign-sponsored terrorism. “These sacrifices of our brave soldiers further reinforce our unwavering commitment to safeguarding our nation at all costs,” the statement said.
The assault is the latest in a sharp escalation of violence across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the neighbouring province of Balochistan, where security forces have come under sustained pressure from the Pakistani Taliban and, in Balochistan’s case, separatist groups including the Baloch Liberation Army. Both regions border Afghanistan, and Pakistani officials have repeatedly said militants use safe havens across the frontier to plan and launch attacks before retreating.
Just last week, the military said its forces had killed 24 militants in Bannu district and its surrounding areas over a 24-hour period, following what ISPR described as a surge in attacks on police and a string of suicide bombings in the district. And in May, at least 15 police officers were killed when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the Fateh Khel police post, also in Bannu. Sajjad Khan, the regional police officer for Bannu, said 18 officers had been stationed at the post at the time; 15 died and three were wounded.
The frequency of such attacks reflects a broader deterioration in security across the province. Figures from the Centre for Research and Security Studies’ Annual Security Report for 2025 show that fatalities linked to militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa rose from 1,620 in 2024 to 2,331 the following year, a jump that has placed the province at the centre of Pakistan’s renewed confrontation with militant groups nearly three years after the TTP formally ended a ceasefire with Islamabad.
Friday’s attack in Tank, a district that sits along the boundary with South Waziristan and has been repeatedly targeted in recent months, underscores how difficult that fight remains. Earlier this month, two police officers were killed and two more wounded in a roadside bomb attack on a police vehicle in the same district, while a police constable was shot dead in broad daylight in the town’s main bazaar and another was injured after militants threw a grenade at a checkpost near a local shrine.
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