By Staff Reporter
BANNU: For the third straight day, security forces pressed deep into the villages ringing the embattled Bannu district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Sunday, part of a widening campaign against militants that has left one terrorist killed and eight others in custody, according to police.
The latest raid conducted in Grera Shah Jahan, a village where soldiers moved in before dawn to seal off roads and set up checkpoints, giving police, a paramilitary unit known as the Elite Force, and the Counter-Terrorism Department room to search house to house. The operation was overseen by Bannu’s police chief, Capt. (retd.) Muhammad Furqan Bilal, according to a statement from his office.
The dead militant was killed as he tried to bury an improvised explosive device, police said. Searching his body afterward, officers recovered an AK-47 rifle, ammunition magazines, and a bandolier of cartridges — the makings, investigators said, of an attack still in preparation when it was stopped.
The eight others detained in the sweep were described by police only as suspicious individuals. They have since been handed to the Counter-Terrorism Department and district police, who are questioning them jointly, authorities said. No further details on their identities or suspected roles were released.
In a separate search tied to the same operation, police said they found two Honda motorcycles and a rickshaw stashed inside a house belonging to a wanted militant known by the alias “Uncle” — a man police identified as Zargul. His whereabouts remained unknown Sunday evening.
Bannu police, in their statement, vowed the campaign would not let up. “Joint operations with law enforcement and security agencies will continue to eliminate terrorism, maintain law and order and protect the lives and property of the public,” the statement said, adding that officials had praised Bilal’s leadership of the effort.
A district under siege
Sunday’s raid is the latest measure in a monthslong deterioration of security across Bannu, a district that has become one of the deadliest fronts in Pakistan’s renewed fight against militancy.
Two days earlier, the military’s press office, known as Inter-Services Public Relations, announced that security forces had killed 24 militants in Bannu and the surrounding area over a single 24-hour stretch — a toll that underscored just how intense the fighting here has become. The military said the operations were a response to what it called a “surge” in attacks on police and a spate of suicide bombings that has gripped the district in recent weeks.
Pakistani officials have blamed the violence on the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, the banned militant group also known as the Pakistani Taliban, which the military referred to in its statement as “Fitna-al-Khawarij” — a label the state has increasingly attached to the group, alongside accusations that it operates as a proxy for India.
The bloodshed in Bannu reached a new pitch Wednesday night, when militants rammed a vehicle packed with explosives into Miryan Police Station, touching off a powerful explosion that was followed by an hourslong gun battle. A police officer was killed in the assault, and six other security personnel were wounded alongside four civilians, according to police.
Officers said the attackers tried to storm the station in the chaos after the blast but were beaten back by police and reinforcements who arrived at the scene. Police credited that response with preventing what could have been a far deadlier siege.
The attack on Miryan Police Station was only the most recent in a string of assaults that have targeted not just police but also local jirgas, the traditional councils of elders that have long served as a check on militant influence in the region. That pattern — violence aimed at the institutions meant to resist the militants — has become a hallmark of the current wave of attacks, and it is what has driven police and the military to launch the kind of targeted, neighborhood-by-neighborhood operations now underway across Bannu.
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